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PREACHING IN NEW YORK 
i 
JOSEPH FORT NEWTON, Lirt.D., D.D. 





PREACHING IN 
NEW YORK 


Diaries and Laperg |) aN 






ait 


BY wr 


JOSEPH FORT NEWTON 
LITT.D., D.D. 
Author of “Some Living Masters of the Pulpit,’ “The Sword 
of the Spirit,’ “Preaching in London,” etc. 


NEW os YORK 


GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT, 1924, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


PREACHING IN NEW YORK 


— A— 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


To 


FRANK OLIVER HALL, D.D. 


MY BELOVED PREDECESSOR 
IN THE 
CHURCH OF THE DIVINE PATERNITY 


I inscribe these Memories of 
Preaching in New York 
with honor and affection 


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THE VESTIBULE 


The kindness with which readers have re- 
ceived a few pages from my diary of Preaching 
in London, has encouraged me to hope that 
they may be willing to share some of my im- 
pressions and experiences of New York, of 
which Americans know almost as little as they 
know of London. Returning from the City 
Temple in November, 1919, I began my work. 
as minister of the Church of the Divine Pa- 
ternity, New York, on the first Sunday in 
December ; and the following diary, taking up 
the tale where the London diary left off, covers 
two years, made the more interesting by the 
new, strange, and almost terrifying America 
which I discovered on my return. 

The New York of today is unique, amazing, 
puzzling—bewildering even to its own people, 
too huge for intimate knowledge or affection— 
incredibly provincial for all its cosmopolitan- 
ism; no longer the “Little Old New York,” 


when Delmonico’s was on Broadway, and Tif- 
Vii 


Vill The Vestibule 


fany’s looked out on the fountains in Union 
Square, and a Daly first-night was like a large 
family party. It is a vast, far-spreading hu- 
man encampment of many races; a gigantic 
medley of wealth and want, of palaces of pleas- 
ure and hovels of poverty; an apocalypse of 
America at its brilliant best and worst; at once 
a problem, a challenge, and a prophecy. 

No doubt old New Yorkers will smile at 
more than one entry in this diary; but they 
must remember that the writer did not know 
our chief city before, save as a tourist and 
casual visitor, and that is hardly to know it at 
all. Condon is all of a piece, and one finds the 
same English life everywhere, whereas New 
York is a human hotch-potch, and no one knows 
what the next turn may reveal. These im- 
pressions, observations, and reflections, such 
as they are, may have a certain interest, if not 
as interpretations, at least as a series of pictures 
of men, women, and things in the most amazing 
city on earth. 

Certain pages from the diary appeared as a 
serial in the Atlantic Monthly, September and 
October, 1922; and the Editor has been good 
enough to allow me to use them here. The 


The Vestibule 1X 


papers added help to show how stimulating life 
may be in this city where world-end ideas and 
peoples meet; and in a book about Preaching in 
New York, it is not inappropriate to include a 
sermon on New York itself, a vision of its 
human wonder, an attempt to interpret its 
place and meaning among the great cities of the 
world, and its prophecy of the future in 
America. 


J. FN. 


The Church of the Divine Paternity, 
New York City 


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CONTENTS 


Diaries 
The New America 
‘‘Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 


Papers 
At Tea with Tagore 
The New Curiosity Shop 
New York City 


PAGE 
15 
74 


153 
167 
186 





PREACHING IN NEW YORK 





PREACHING IN 
NEW YORK 


Diaries 


The New America 


November 14, 1919.—Farewell, England! 
How lovely it looked to-day, as we rode down 
from London to Southampton—like a huge 
park, neat and well-kept; its red brick houses 
half-hidden by vines; a soft haze hanging over 
the scene, like the mist of temperament in the 
hearts of its people. What a wonderful 
people! From the battle of the Somme, well- 
nigh four years gone by, until to-day, I have 
walked with them in the Valley of Shadow; 
and I know of what fibre they are made. I 
have seen the soul of England,—quiet, heroic, 
incredibly courageous, unconquerably cheery, 


its valor brightest when the day was darkest, 
15 


16 Preaching in New York 


—and to the end of my days I shall walk more 
reverently because of that vision. Shadows 
still hang over this lovely land, like frayed 
clouds after a storm; but they will lift and melt 
away, and the story of those bitter years will 
become a part of the sad annals of the world. 
Pray God this Island Home, so beloved by a 
mighty race, may never again be wreathed by 
clouds of war! 


November 16.—What shall we do, and how 
can we doit? In Russia they have turned the 
world upside down, and the stokers are on top. 
But revolution never rises above the spiritual 
level of those who make it. Tolstoy thought 
that all of us ought to take our turn at stoking; 
and there may be something in the idea, though 
his example came to little. Carlyle was sure 
that humanity must at last stumble across the 
line between Nonsense and Common Sense. 
But common sense is not enough. Welive ina 
common-sense world, and it looks like a Devil’s 
Kitchen. Something more divine, more dar- 
ing’, than common sense is needed, if we are to 
have common sense. Jesus was right, and all 
the facts confirm his vision: Brotherhood is 


The New America 17 


the fourth dimension! So one dreams, sailing 
on a grey, fluffy sea from the land of day be- 
fore yesterday to the land of the day after 
to-morrow! 


November 20.—The news is that the Senate 
has rejected the Treaty of Peace. No wonder; 
it is a monstrosity—a league of idealism and a 
treaty of imperialism, each making the other 
null. Alas, one fears that the Senate rejected 
the idealism more emphatically than it did the 
imperialism. One is not surprised that Mark 
Twain wanted to meet the Devil, “if only to see 
a person who for untold centuries has been the 
spiritual head of four fifths of the human race 
and political head of the whole of it, and must 
have executive ability of the highest order.” 
At Paris he acted as president of “‘the heaven- 
and-hell amalgamation society,” and his feat 
was nothing short of a masterpiece. 

It reminds one of Joseph Parker and his 
famous sermon on “God and the Experts.”’ 
When he told a group of young ministers what 
was to be the subject of his sermon, he dared 
them to guess what his text would be. They 
tried valiantly, but failed. Nor did they find 


18 Preaching in New York 


out until he mounted the high pulpit and an- 
nounced the words, “The stone which the 
builders refused is become the head stone of 
the corner.’’ Then, after a dramatic pause, he 
thundered: “The builders! The men who 
know all about stones!’’ Again, at Paris, the 
experts,—the statesmen who know all about 
states, and carry their pockets full of provinces, 
—having rejected the corner stone, have built 
a house that cannot stand. 

What different views one hears in the hum of 
talk on board this miniature world. Most for- 
eigners are puzzled, not knowing what to make 
of it all. Americans are depressed or elated, 
according to party. My British friends are 
irritatingly serene. Every one of them ought 
to be in an asylum for the hopelessly sane. 
They never lose their heads. Of course, they 
miss a lot of fun by not going crazy occasion- 
ally, as we do in America; but if they could be 
distributed over the earth in right proportion, 
they would keep the whole world from going 
mad. 


November 23.—As we near America all its 
history and legend throbs in my heart, vivid 


The New America 19 


and thrilling, like a sweet habit of the blood. 
The very air is different, as if the spirit of home 
had run out to meet us on a lonely sea. Yet 
these years of tragedy have left in me a great 
veneration for the land whence our fathers 
came, and for its people. In America they are 
sure to be saying ugly things about England, 
as in England they said nasty things about 
America; and I shall be hurt both ways. It 
is plain that I am in for a hot time from now on, 
like a man torn between his wife and his 
mother, both of whom are adepts at snippy 


gossip. 


November 24.—Slowly our good ship crept 
through the gray mists of a late autumn morn- 
ing, passing Lady Liberty to whom a British 
friend took off his hat, saying that She ought 
to stand with her back to a land of Prohibition 
—ashamed! Then, dimly at first, we saw the 
wonderland of the city, rising sheer from the. 
level of the water, half-fantastic in its airy 
lightness, like a range of fairy mountains—only 
the sky line was broken with more precision 
than in the wild architecture of nature. Above 
all towered a peak which might be Matterhorn, 


20 Preaching in New York 


which they told Cardinal Mercier was the spire 
of the “Church of St. Woolworth.” The Car- 
dinal, it is said, looked dazed, not remembering 
any such Saint in the calendar, but ready for 
any new adventure that might befall him in 
America. And so, home at last! 

It is bewildering to pass quickly from Old 
London Town, with its time-stained buildings 
and its whity-brown atmosphere, into the bril- 
liant streets of New York, with its newness, its 
youthfulness, its lucid sunlight in which every- 
thing stands out distinctly, and where the air 
is like champagne. Still more disconcerting is 
the difference in psychological climate. One is 
all repression, the other all expression. 
“Hush! It is so rude, don’t you know’’—that 
is England. “Hello! Hurrah! Where do 
we go from here?”—that is America, the land 
of talk, where people tell all they know and live 
with the blinds up. Meanwhile, the first letter 
I opened, from a great editor in the Middle 
West, was not very encouraging :— 

Why stop in New York, if you object to living in 
a foreign city? It is a meaningless conglomeration 
of humanity, swept together from the ends of the 


earth; an unhealthy coating on a stone tongue in the 
mouth of the Hudson—a wart on the nose of civiliza- 


The New America 21 


tion. Its architecture, like its confusion of tongues, 
has the Tower of Babel backed off the map. The 
Jews own it, the Irish run it, the Americans visit it in 
rubberneck wagons. It is bounded on the east by 
Blackwell’s Island, on the south by Wall Street, on the 
west by Greenwich Village, on the north by Babe Ruth 
and the Polo Grounds. Its business is chasing the 
dollar, its diversion the leg-show, its political symbol 
a Tiger. When you land, buy a ticket to America! 


November 28.—Wandered for hours on 
Broadway last night, between 33rd and soth 
Streets, in a wilderness of lights, amid the 
clanging, honking traffic, jostled, buffeted in a 
polyglot procession—a stranger in the land of 
my fathers. How different it is from the dim 
lights of London, with its slow-moving, monas- 
tic multitudes, so reticent, so respectful, so soft- 
voiced. Yet how good it is to see people who 
are happy, and to hear the ring of laughter, 
even if it does hint of the vivacious shallowness 
which New York suggests. Europe is old, 
war-weary, gray with grief; America has 
hardly known sorrow at all. 

What a vast, illuminated billboard Broadway 
is—nervous, shifting sheets of many-colored 
electric transparencies, fantastic, ingenious, re- 
splendent; a thousand sparkling splendors all 
to exalt the virtues of a corset, a cake of soap, 


22 Preaching in New York 


or a bar of chewing gum! If one could not 
read, it would be beautiful. It oppressed me, 
the garish glitter of it all, the shrieking impor- 
tance of unimportant things, the desecration of 
the sweet mysticism of the night by the crude, 
aggressive materialism of the day. Lightning 
stolen from the heavens and woven into shapes 
of fairy-like beauty to—sell pickles! This 
. morning, in the pitiless light of day, it looks so 
empty, so ugly, its colors a smear of dirty 
rogue, its flaming legends skeleton trickeries, 
its gorgeous palaces mere scaffoldings. O, 
America ! 


November 30.—Went to hear Dr. Kelman, 
at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, 
where he had just begun his ministry. It 
looked like a City Temple congregation, and I 
wondered if the preacher felt an atmosphere 
different from a Scottish church. He seemed 
restrained, as if hesitating to let himself go. 
I know the feeling. I had the same sense of 
strangeness the first six months at the City 
Temple, until one of the deacons said to me, 
with a smile, “Quit that pussyfooting, like a cat 
in a strange garret.” Dr. Kelman begins his 


The New America 23 


ministry in an evil hour of rancor and reaction; 
but he will win through, as much by the gen- 
uineness of his manhood, as by his genius as a 
preacher. The first Sunday he was here a 
little child was run over by a car near the John 
Hall Mission, and he was soon knocking at the 
door of that beshadowed home. Such things 
mean more than much eloquence. Someone 
called Dr. Kelman a preacher of “the middle 
register”; it may be so, but he took our minds 
to church. There was no flowery emptiness, 
no pious pap. The sermon had the ring of 
reality, as of a man looking straight at the 
truth and telling it simply and vividly, in a 
style both noble and chaste, without sacrificing 
either candor or restraint. All the way 
through, I seemed to be listening to an old 
Greek who had seen Jesus in Galilee and Judea, 
and had journeyed to America by way of the 
land of Bunyan and Stevenson, of whom he has 
written with such fine interpretative insight. 
Long may he labor among us! 


December 10,—There is something new in 
American life, which I feel everywhere but find 
it hard to understand—a wild, shuddering fear, 


24 Preaching in New York 


half-hysterical in its panic. When I ask what 
it means, I am told that we have been sleeping 
over a volcano, and that it is a fifty-fifty chance 
of saving our institutions. What nonsense! 
Our people do not trust one another, and speak 
in a whisper. When I tell of the freedom of 
speech in England, I am assured that it will 
never do here. The melting-pot does not melt; 
and after fifty years of immigration we are 
still a heterogeneous people, with every Euro- 
pean race and rancor represented. Free 
speech may be possible in England, my friends 
argue, where everybody knows every twist of 
the public mind; but it is different when an Irish 
Catholic policeman has to listen to an atheist 
Russian Jew on a soap-box at the street corner. 
Yet I have seen a London “Bobbie” keeping 
order in Hyde Park, while a Red Russian an- 
archist spoke his piece. 

No, it is all wrong. No doubt there are un- 
digested foreign groups in America,—chiefly 
in our cities,—but repression is a poor aid to 
digestion. If our people do not understand 
their new neighbors, it is high time they made 
their acquaintance. Wholesome fear is stimu- 
lating, but this paralyzing terror is absurd. 


The New America 25 


December 21.—To-day the Buford sailed, 
with two hundred and fifty alien radicals, 
deported on charge of being anarchists; one 
of them was a boy eighteen—what harm has 
he done America? It is the war-mind gone 
mad, running down Reds as of old men hunted 
witches; but what strikes one is the absurdity 
of it all—tike calling out the heavy artillery to 
bombard mosquitoes. At the same time, one 
hears the most rabid abuse of the President, 
which does more injury to our institutions than 
all the Reds in Redland. If there is evil propa- 
ganda among us, surely it is to be met by 
propaganda of the right kind. America has 
more to fear from the blind rage of mob-mind- 
edness than from all the agitators. No one can 
really injure America but Americans; and they 
are in a fair way to do it by a terror-stricken 
intolerance to-day, followed by indifferent neg- 
ligence to-morrow. Only about half of our 
people ever vote! 


December 25.—Welcome the Spirit of 
Christmas—symbol of the Eternal Child, and 
“The Cradle endlessly rocking.” It is needed 
in this old world, if only to keep alive the souls 


26 Preaching in New York 


of us, and to renew our faith in almost for- 
gotten dreams. May it flourish to the con- 
founding of all unkindness, all uncleanness. It 
takes us down from our towering pride, and 
teaches us humility and sweet charity. It 
brings us, on one day at least, to a simplicity of 
faith in the Golden Age, free of the shadow of 
the Night and the fear of the Morrow. 
Blessed Christmas Day—it rescues us, for a 
moment, from the tyranny of things, and gives 
such as have lost their child-heart hope that it 
will come back to them sometime, somewhere— 
if not on earth, mayhap out yonder with the 
dwellers of the City on the Hill. 


January 4.—To-day the following letter flut- 
tered down upon my desk:—‘“Dear Preacher: 
A guest at the San Remo Hotel, I attended the 
Church of the Divine Paternity for the first 
time three weeks ago. Frankly I was inter- 
ested, then puzzled, and finally delighted to find 
an orthodox preacher in a liberal pulpit. At 
first I was inclined to ask how, why, and by 
what right you are where you are? Now I 
am ready to put it the other way round: Why 
not? We have liberal preachers in orthodox 


The New America a7 


pulpits, and I see no reason why we should not 
have an orthodox preacher in a liberal pulpit. 
Turn about is fair play, and it is a poor rule 
that works but one way. May the vision grow 
and abide till death hangs his sickle at your 
garden gate.” 

Yes, orthodox in experience and liberal in 
thought—if only we could keep the two to- 
gether—my ministry moves beyond the strife 
of tongues, seeking the higher unities of things 
which differ. In the debates now going on, 
which may mean a realignment of churches, 
I remember the example of Luther. When he 
went to Leipsic to dispute with Eck, he carried 
in his hand a bunch of flowers; and the record 
adds, “When the discussion became hot he 
looked at it and smelt it.” If in all our re- 
ligious debates each of us carried a bunch of 
flowers, there would be more sweetness and 
light, and less lightning, in our discussions. 


January 10.—By happy accident ran into 
Edwin Markham at the Club to-day. Had not 
seen him since five years ago, when we waylaid 
him on his flight from the Far West, and de- 
tained him for three snowy days in Iowa. 


28 Preaching in New York 


Whatever the weather, it is always springtime 
in his climate. If white winter has settled on 
his good gray head, it is because the summer 
has gone to his heart, where there is always 
bloom and bird-song. Walking in The Shoes 
of Happiness, he knows how to join the joy of 
youth without its silliness, and the wisdom of 
age without its weariness. We talked of many 
things: of the blind spot in Whitman—as of 
one who went to séances where things get 
blurred; of the present state of poetry in Eng- 
land; of a long poem he had written, the title 
of which did not fit; of all the world and the 
rest of mankind. The upshot of an argument 
about the nature of poetry was that he prom- 
ised to come to my Recognition Service, and 
make an address on “The Poet and the 
Preacher.” Thereupon, as an advance deposit 
on that promise, he sat down and wrote a qua- 
train, which, he said, sums up my faith; as in- 
deed it does—only, alas, it makes most of us 
Christians of the Left Hand :— 
“No soul can be forever banned, 
Eternally bereft; 


Whoever falls from God’s right hand 
Is caught into his left.” 


The New America 29 


January 11.—Received a letter from a noble 
and able man whom I had invited to my Recog- 
nition Service. His pessimism is the reverse 
side of his moral earnestness, but his letter 
shows how the war has revealed, as in a flash, 
“the looped and windowed raggedness”’ of or- 
ganized Christianity. He writes, expressing 
what is in many minds: 

“Dear Padre—Often we have talked about 
preaching, you insisting upon its utility, I argu- 
ing its futility. While we do not agree, I honor 
your tenacity to tradition: the church calls you 
with many voices—every voice a memory. To 
me the plight of the modern preacher is pitiful. 
If he is not a mere ‘seller of rhetoric,’ if he is 
spiritually alive and wants to speak for the 
whole community, he cannot do it. He is re- 
garded as the spokesman of a sect, sometimes 
so small as to be an insect. It is nothing short 
of tragedy, and he is not to blame for it. 

“The church in its present form is hopeless; 
its organization inefficient, its sectarianism a 
stupidity. If not dead, it is deadening, and the 
odor of decomposition is in the air. Yes, I 
know what you will say about renewing it 
from within; but it cannot be done. Twenty 


30 Preaching in New York 


years ago it turned its back upon the new 
science, and lost the leadership of thought. To- 
day it rejects the social vision which is the word 
of God for our day. It is not that it fails to 
take Jesus literally; it fails to take Him se- 
riously. 

“Look at New York. Where do you find the 
great churches? It is where wealth is most 
evident! There are churches enough in Fifth 
Avenue, but as you go eastward the spires are 
few. The old downtown churches are sold for 
vast sums, and the money used to build gor- 
geous religious club-houses up town—retreat- 
ing from human need, leaving the masses in 
poverty and despair. Our church-life is a 
gratification, seldom a sacrifice. It coddles the 
prosperous, and forgets the dwellers in the 
abyss. It skims the middle class, nothing more. 

“Why waste time on the sermon-saturated 
pagans of the pew, who would be the same kind 
of persons without the church as with it? They 
are not hypocrites—not consciously so; they are 
the conventional type, loyal to a tradition for 
family or social reasons. They are the sort 
who put Jesus to death long ago, and they are 
trying to embalm Him to-day. Stay in the 


The New America 31 


church if you can, Padre; some of us stay out 
in order to keep our religion.” 


January 12.—To-night a dinner was given 
in my honor, attended by fifty of the leading 
ministers of New York, representing all de- 
nominations. It was a fraternal hour, offering 
an opportunity for an account of my experi- 
ences in England as bearing upon the problem 
of Anglo-American friendship; and a discus- 
sion of the new function of the Christian min- 
istry in international affairs—my experience 
being significant only because it is related to 
the larger issue. The dinner was a gracious 
conspiracy instigated by Dr. Frederick Lynch, 
one of the most useful men in the nation, and 
one of the most lovable—a liaison officer in the 
service of Christ, whose life is a ministry of 
reconciliation, interpretation, and _ strategic 
good-will. 

Since my return I have done little else but 
speak in behalf of fraternity between English- 
speaking peoples; but I seem to be talking 
against the wind. My ship of good-will runs 
into all kinds of snags,—Irish snags, Japanese 
snags, naval snags,—and I do not get very far. 


a0 Preaching in New York 


Debt on one side, suspicion on the other, joined 
with lack of knowledge on both sides, make 
hard sailing. Whatever it is, apart from mere 
mischief-making, which has again aroused ill- 
feeling, it is a stupendous stupidity. Surely the 
friends of Anglo-Saxon fellowship make a mis- 
take in narrowing their appeal. It is not merely 
for the countries concerned that such unity is 
necessary, but for the peace and stability of the 
whole world; and in both countries the wider 
conception would do much to dissolve misunder- 
standing. Perhaps, in a better mood and under 
a clearer sky, we can at least see the snags and 
avoid, if not remove, them. 


January 18.—Bernard Shaw in his play, 
Pygmalion, has his Professor Higgins stand in 
Covent Garden and tell, by listening to their 
speech, the streets in which the passers-by live. 
Such a feat would be difficult in this town. 
New York is polygot cosmopolitanism in con- 
gestion; one can walk hours and never hear the 
English language. Even when one does hear 
English, often enough it is spoken with an 
accent as hideous as the Cockney accent in 
London. When I hear such a dialect, I can 


The New America an 


only make signs in reply. It is neither English 
nor American—Esperanto nor Eskimo—and 
when it talks slang, one is moved to pray for 
the Gift of Tongues. A story I heard to-day 
made me long for an interpreter. A second- 
hand dealer moved to Brooklyn and built a new 
home, which he called The Cloisters: 

“Tt’s a nice joint ye got here, aw’ right, aw’ 
right,’ said his partner; “but why do ye call it 
The Cloisters? Wot’s the big idea? Puttin’ 
on dog, eh?” 

“TI calls it The Cloisters,” the dealer ex- 
plained, “because I gotta be cloise to the movie 
palace, cloise to the trolley line, and cloise to 
the theayter. Get me, bonehead?” 


January 20.—The white magic of winter! 
Snow fell softly all night, and this morning the 
city stood out in the sunlight like a mighty 
sculpture in marble and porphyry and onyx, 
dazzling, gleaming, incredibly beautiful, as if 
the City of God had descended to earth—only, 
alas, it will soon be stained by smoke and smut, 
like the taint of mortal sin. Central Park 
looked like a woodland in fairy-land, where the 
White Queen holds court—all a-glitter in its 


34 Preaching in New York 


blinding splendor. A swift gale swept out of 
the north, driving flocks of clouds, dappling the 
scene with light and shadow—sudden brighten- 
ings and equally sudden darkenings—tittle 
clouds, white above, gray below, flame em- 
broidered, scudding through the crystalline sky, 
flinging sharp shadows on the snow. It is the 
old enchantment, older than the city, as old as 
the hills—the enchantment of nature which is 
forever working wonders for such as have eyes 
to see. 


January 25.—To-night was my Recognition 
Service as minister of the Church of the Divine 
Paternity, and it was an hour of fraternal 
courtesy and Christian good-will. It is an old 
church, as we count oldness in the New World; 
and, like other churches, it has journeyed up- 
town with the years, from Pearl Street, opposite 
City Hall Place, to Seventy-Sixth Street, over- 
looking Central Park. Organised in 1838, it 
has had three ministers in the last seventy years, 
a record highly honorable alike to pulpit and 
pew. In 1852 its edifice stood on Broadway, 
near Spring Street, and there Thackeray de- 
livered his lectures on the English Humorists.. 


The New America 35 


On Broadway, and later on Fifth Avenue, its 
pulpit was glorified by the genius of Edwin 
Chapin, whose eloquence made it a forum of 
liberty in the anti-slavery agitation, a shrine of 
patriotism during the Civil War, and an altar 
of faith until his death in 1880. Eaton and 
Hall each added a dimension to its history and 
its power. 

The church to-day, built in cathedral style 
with a Magdalen College tower, is rich in 
memorials, and its chancel is one of the loveliest 
in America. A mosaic of “Christ at the Feet 
of His Disciples” rises above bas-reliefs of Dr. 
Chapin by St. Gaudens, of Dr. Sawyer by Bick- 
ford, and a tablet to Dr. Eaton. A carved oak 
pulpit and an exquisite Tiffany communion 
altar stand between stately candelabra—which 
always make me think of that “Lamp of Poor 
Souls” kept burning in the ancient cathedrals. 
To the right, an American flag hangs from a 
staff cut from a rail off the old Lincoln farm. 
To me the Whitfield memorial organ, with its 
myriad tones and echoes, is a symbol of the 
faith of the church, as if foretelling the triumph 
of a Divine Love which shall yet woo every 


36 Preaching in New York 


wandering human tone into one sovereign 
Harmony—a time beyond time, when the name- 
less pathos, which haunts all earthly music 
whatsoever, shall be heard no more. 


February 1.—From an English home in Eal- 
ing—shut in by vine-covered walls, the draw- 
ing-room door opening into a flower garden,— 
to a New York apartment house, is a novel 
adventure. Here we are, several hundreds of 
people, each family living on a separate shelf, 
like doves in their cotes, piled up, jammed to- 
gether, yet with no spirit of neighborliness! 
No one knows who lives above or below, and 
nobody cares. They show no curiosity one for 
the other ; they never speak, and seldom glance 
up, when they meet in the hallways. Yester- 
day a man was carried out in his coffin—tipped 
endwise in the elevator—and the fact of his 
funeral was the first knowledge we had that 
he ever lived. Opening the door of the dumb- 
waiter—at the risk of being guillotined—one 
gazes down a deep, narrow well, like the Bot- 
tomless Pit in the Mammoth Cave, hearing 
all kinds of languages, and seeing other heads 
sticking out at various angles. It is a new 


The New America 37 


kind of life, requiring no little adjustment both 
of body and of mind. 

Outside a roar of traffic amid dizzy heights; 
a whirr as of invisible machines; the thunder 
of the overhead railway; the screech of police 
whistles; myriads of flashing lights and danc- 
ing electric signs, making the timid moon seem 
pallid and unreal; streams of people incessantly 
passing by—foreign, strange, seldom an 
American face—Greeks, Poles, Letts, Italians, 
Russians, all kiths and clans, chattering in un- 
known tongues—it is New York! If one could 
see it for a second, not in fragments, but entire, 
its mighty unimaginableness, its solitary multi- 
tudinousness—a shoreless ocean of humanity 
tossing up to the astonished skies its grey bil- 
lows of stone—it would break the heart. No 
wonder Blake was blinded by a vision of Lon- 
don; it charred his eyes. 


February 12.—Dr. Fosdick spoke at the 
Lincoln Night gathering of the church clubs, 
his topic being the future of New York—which 
he quickly dropped for matters nearer to his 
heart. Had not heard him since he came to 
preach for me in the City Temple during the 


38 Preaching in New York 


war. While others feel dismay at the sulky, 
uppish mood in which America is flouting its 
own idealism, he is defiant, and some of his 
sentences flashed like zigzag lightning. Master 
of all the arts of speech, using jeweled phrases 
with inevitable ease, he made the issue of 
religion in our day and land startlingly vivid 
and compelling. Sturdy, picturesque, winsome, 
he is a prophet of that new note in Christianity 
heard by a small but gallant company of young 
men in all communions, who mean to preach 
it with gentle but relentless insistence in the 
days that lie ahead. He speaks as a man of 
insight, with the artist touch and the glow of 
genius. There is no fluffy prose-poetry, no per- 
fumed and prettified art decorating a candied 
Christianity; but a vital mind laid against the 
stuff of life—virility kindled by vision and 
softened by that pity which is the heart of all 
great preaching. Noman among us gives more 
promise of Christian leadership in a tangled 
time. 


February 26.—Some reporter caught a flying 
paragraph from my sermon to the Sons of the 
American Revolution; and now I am flooded 


The New America 39 


with letters telling me what is wrong with the 
Church. Everything is wrong with it, ap- 
parently. Seven men take pains to tell me 
that religion is a narcotic, and the Church an 
“organised fake founded upon myth and mys- 
tery.” Conservatives think it is infected with 
radicalism, and radicals denounce it for its 
“abject, cowardly obeisance to organised and 
endowed injustice.” One man thinks it useful 
only as a nursery, an ambulance, or an under- 
taker. A long essay tells me how and why, if 
the pulpit adopted the gospel according to 
Henry George, the churches would be filled 
with eager multitudes. Some hold that the 
plight of the Church is due to its loss of the 
great expectancy of the speedy and dramatic 
coming of Christ; and others that it preaches 
a truncated gospel, bereft of the power of heal- 
ing. Numbers of letters tell of failure to meet 
ordinary obligations, lack of neighborliness, 
trickery, fraud, and scandal on the part of 
church people—it makes me sad to read about 
it. One woman insists that there is more 
“honest-to-God religion” outside the Church 
than inside, and that it would be just as well to 
close the churches, and in their stead to print 


40 Preaching in New York 


a placard to be hung in schools, railway stations, 
and the post office bearing the words of Jesus: 
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
mind and all thy heart, and thy neighbor as 
thyself.” Besides, it would be less expensive. 

So it goes, leaving me bewildered, until I 
remember that the Church is just ourselves, 
with the faults of humanity, and will not be 
better till we have better material. Most of 
these letters affirm that economic issues are re- 
placing theological questions in the mind of 
to-day; a man from Detroit states it plainly: 
“Men are thinking to-day of the means of liv- 
ing, not of the meaning of life.”” What we are 
confronted with is not, specifically, indifference 
to religion, but indifference to nearly everything 
outside the circle of the Cult of Comfort. 
Shifting the emphasis from theology to! so- 
ciology will only mean a new sectarianism in 
place of the old,—a radical church on one 
corner, a conservative on the next,—and the 
last state will be as bad as the first. Amateur 
sermons on economics make a terrifying pros- 
pect ! 

Of course, the preachers come in for a hard 
hammering, and, as the late Dean Hodges used 


The New America 41 


to say, “It is richly deserved by those who de- 
serve it.” Much of it is deserved, by reason of 
the conditions under which ministers work. 
They are an underpaid, overworked, heroic set 
of men, and the demands upon them are so 
exacting, so exhausting, that they have little 
time to be preachers, much less prophets. They 
have no easy task, trying to bring high truth 
home to moving-picture minds, in a day of 
moral chaos and paprika cleverness. The key- 
board of the modern mind is new, and they have 
not yet learned to play on it. But the realities 
remain, and the ancient needs of the heart; and 
if we interpret them in terms of our time,— 
not using a violin as if it were a ’cello,—there 
will be ears to hear. The Church is dead! 
Long live the Church! 


March 1.—Preached recently for the first 
time in old Plymouth Church, bringing the 
greetings and blessing of the City Temple, 
where the picture of Beecher still hangs in the 
lecture-room and the memory of his eloquence 
is a legend. Joseph Parker and Beecher were 
friends, and it behooves us to recall such his- 
toric ties at a time when voices of consideration 


42 Preaching in New York 


are few and faintly heard. Each in his own 
distinction and power a supremely great 
preacher,—Parker a trumpet, Beecher an or- 
chestra,—both made their pulpits shrines, not 
only of Christian faith, but of international 
good-will. In Plymouth Church there sounded 
the wondrous voice of the greatest preacher to 
the people our race has known—the Shake- 
speare of our pulpit, whose genius seemed in- 
exhaustible in its fertility, whose ministry 
marked a new date both in the religion and 
politics of our Republic. From that pulpit he 
went on his memorable ambassadorship to Eng- 
land, to plead the cause of Lincoln in the forum 
of British public opinion; and his victory was 
one of the noblest triumphs of the spoken word 
in history. Whatever may be the chances and 
changes of the future, Plymquth Church and 
the City Temple must be kept as shrines of 
historic memory and thrones of spiritual 
prophecy. 


March 12.—Went the other day to a Free- 
thinkers’ society, and heard a lecture that filled 
me with amazement. I had thought that species 
of mind extinct; but it still persists, like a rut 


The New America 43 


in an abandoned road, as archaic as the crude 
dogmatism which it denies. Ingersoll was de- 
lightful, with his rich humanity, his rippling 
humor, and his radiant prose-poetry—a posi- 
tive mind on the negative side of religious 
thought. Without his genius, “rationalism” 
looks like logic-chopping pettifoggery; a thing 
killed and stuffed. But it can be amusing, as 
when the great advances of religious thought 
are interpreted as retreats followed up by the 
Rationalist Army. They are like men who have 
been bombarding a position and find that the 
enemy has long ago moved elsewhere, unaware 
of their existence. But to save their face they 
must keep up the bombardment. Make-believe 
championship of free thought to-day is like 
going over the top of an imaginary trench— 
futile, not to say pitiful. The old dogmatism 
and the old rationalism, as much alike as two 
of a kind, are alike obsolete. They are not 
refuted: they are forgotten. It reminded me 
of old Wallaston, in the Autobiography of 
Mark Rutherford, whose ideas acquired long 
ago had “never fructified in him, but were like 
hard stones which rattled in his pockets.” 


44 Preaching in New York 


March 14.—Somehow I have a curious feel- 
ing about the Drinkwater play, Abraham 
Lincoln. It handles the supreme figure of our 
history reverently; but, though he loved the 
theatre, it is hardly fair to put the least the- 
atrical of men on the stage. Something deep 
in me protests against it as a sacrilege. The 
play did good in London, as an interpretation 
of Lincoln to the English people, albeit not 
without error. The servants were too much 
like English servants, and the negro dialect was 
more like North American Indian dialect. 
Also, the drinking proclivities of General Grant 
were exaggerated. No doubt these defects have 
been removed ; but I doubt if any one ever called 
Lincoln “Abe,” even behind his back. We may 
be a nation of back-slappers, but there are some 
men with whom we take no liberties. The first 
act, except for one moving moment,—when 
Lincoln is alone, looking at a map of his coun- 
try,—has too much spurious prophecy. Yet 
the figure does grow portentously, and in a 
world of flesh and blood and spirit. Hook, the 
fictitious member of the Cabinet, embodying 
the distrust of Lincoln, is a happy stroke. 
What reception would the play have had if it 


The New America A5 


had been the work of an American artist? As 
it is, a play from London, like a hat from Paris, 
is the thing. 


March 20.—These Lenten days make me 
think of the remark of “A.E.” to James Joyce: 
“1’m afraid you have not enough chaos in you 
to make a world.” Surely Joyce has chaos 
a-plenty—indeed, he has little else—and most 
of us areinlike case. In this matter it is better 
to begin at home; it is handy, and the facts are 
within reach. There are so many “selves” in 
us, all struggling for mastery, that it is not 
easy to detect the elusive, real Self. Which 
“me” is my actual “mer” There are a lot of 
them—the ragged fellow out at the elbow, the 
dandy in fine dress with a gold cane, the toady, 
the pretender, the penitent, the sceptic, the 
preacher, the silly ass who always wants his 
own way; and then, at times, a glimpse of an- 
other Fellow, who seeks to rule the whole 
motley congregation. Who is he? Who gave 
him the job? Will he get it done, making the 
variegated array of slovens, boasters, scullions, 
and the rest, by whiles obey? 

Betimes, if it is not easy to find the real self 


46 Preaching in New York 


in ourselves, we ought not to expect always to 
find it in others. Each man fights a hard fight 
against heavy odds. If he does not always 
show his better self—well, neither do we. But 
the quest of personality—even if it is a game 
of hide-and-seek—is the only thing worth 
while. 


April 1.—Five Socialists were expelled from 
the New York Legislature to-day, after a long 
trial. All Fool’s Day was an appropriate time 
for such a proceeding; the deed fits the day. 
America must have lost its sense of humor. I 
am not a Socialist, nor the son of a Socialist; 
but surely a man has a right to be a Socialist 
in America, and to hold office as such, if fairly 
elected. Anything else makes our whole sys- 
tem a farce. Once men were burned for their 
ideas; now we ought to burn for their ideas 
and let the men live. Unless, indeed, we are 
afraid of ideas, as we seem to be. Respect for 
minorities, no matter how small, is a first prin- 
ciple of democracy. It is better to let folk blow 
off steam; it prevents explosion. If we tolerate 
only those who agree with us, what virtue is 
it? Even tyrants and bigots do the same. 


The New America 47 


April 2—The Communion Service last night 
made me wonder anew why Protestants make 
such poor use of symbol and sacrament, the 
better to bring “folk of many families,” walk- 
ing many scattered ways, distracted and dis- 
traught, into a unity and fellowship of the 
Spirit, that all may know together what none 
may know alone, and become, in very truth, 
the Body of Christ, wearing His seamless robe 
—RHis cross the centre of consecration and the 
sign of conquest. But of that one may not 
speak, except to hope that we may yet find a 
truer expression of that ineffable Reality for 
which words were never made, and which our 
Cult of Ideas leaves unuttered. 

Wesley was wise in this, as in so much else, 
uniting what has been called the active and 
reactive forms of the religious life—method- 
ical with spontaneous mysticism. He was in- 
deed a Methodist, having a method of spiritual 
culture, fasting every Friday, and taking the 
sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, as his diaries 
show, every five days. He tells us that up to 
Feb. 16th, 1791, a fortnight before he reached 
his goal, he had taken the sacrament fifteen 
times since the New Year came in. 


48 Preaching in New York 


Also, he made an evangelistic use of the 
Lord’s Supper, which seems well nigh to have 
been forgotten, inviting all who were seeking 
the Master to gather at His Table, as the place 
where they were most likely to find Him. In 
this he was influenced, no doubt, by the experi- 
ence of his mother, who received “‘assurance” 
at the Lord’s Table in August, 1739. He in- 
vited as many to the Lord’s Table as he invited 
to the Lord, and on the same conditions. That 
is to say, he was wise both in the seeking and 
the practice of salvation. 


April 4.—Easter Day! When an old civil- 
isation was dying and another was coming to 
birth, it was the Christian vision of the Eternal 
Life that gave relief and renewal; and that 
vision we must recapture for our troubled time. 
The idea of immortality current to-day is far 
removed from the faith by which the new, up- 
rising Christianity grasped the crumbling 
classic world and reshaped it. Indeed, we think 
only of a future life—‘‘a series of moments 
snipped off at one end, but not at the other,’— 
whereas Jesus saw each life as part of one great 


The New America 49 


Life, which moves and cannot die. It is a day 
not for arguments, but for anthems! 

Never have I joined in a more impressive 
Easter service than at the beautiful Russian 
Church of St. Nicholas, in East 92nd Street. 
All the worshippers stood ready with unlighted 
candles; and the ritual includes a picturesque 
search for the Body of Christ, which had been 
symbolically laid to rest on Good Friday, but 
was now not to be found, since the Christ had 
risen. The procession of priests and deacons 
passed out of the Church and the chant died 
away, only to increase as the pageant re- 
appeared. Then, suddenly, the great crystal 
chandelier burst into flame, and, as the priests 
with lighted candles passed through the throng, 
the nearest worshippers lighted their own 
tapers and passed the light along—tlike love 
leaping from heart to heart—greeting each 
other with a smile as they crossed themselves. 
Then the Bishop took his post at the royal gate 
and called aloud, “Christ is risen!’ To which 
the people responded, “He is risen indeed!” 
Then, throughout the Church, people ex- 
changed kisses and the greeting, “He is risen, 


50 Preaching in New York 


He is risen!”’ It was all so simple, so artless, 
so eloquent, so aglow with the poetry of faith. 
The hymn at the end, sung with passionate 
fervor, flooded the soul—like happy waters re- 
leased from the prison of winter to go singing 
to the sea. 


April 10.—While in England I was often 
asked about Frank Harris; but I knew him 
only in such books as The Bomb, a volume of 
his Portraits, and his study of Shakespeare— 
which made me mad in five spots at once. So 
I went recently to hear him lecture on Wells; 
but he told me little that was new,—except some 
personal reminiscences,—and he seemed less 
happy than usual in his power of depicting 
personality. There was a fine line about John 
Morley whom he followed as editor of the Fort- 
nightly: “The bleak face lighted up with a 
glint of wintry sunshine.” It reminded me of 
the description of Roosevelt by Wells years 
ago: “The friendly peering snarl of his face, 
like a man with the sun in his eyes.”’ With his 
moustache, his unreadable eyes, and his heavy 
voice, the lecturer looked more like a fighter of 
the Middle Ages than a modern man of letters. 


K 
; 


! 


The New America 51 


He has that rare and precious thing called 
genius; but my impression was puzzling, as of 
a man at.odds with himself, or with the world; 
a proud, sensitive man, thwarted if not 
lacerated. Either he has had a bear fight with 
himself, or he has been the sport of ill fate. 
If, as I have heard, he is writing an auto- 
biography, perhaps it will tell us the secret of 
his enmity to England, which so many regret. 
There is something haunting in him, something 
wild, untamed, quixotic, but lovable withal; like 
a man ready to throw a bomb loaded with— 


pity! 


April 12.—John Morley said that Roosevelt 
was a cross between St. Vitus and the Ten Com- 
mandments. In this respect, as in so many 
others, he was typical of the city of his birth— 
so far, at least, as St. Vitus is concerned. After 
the quieter life of London, the driving energy 
of New York—feverish, furious, almost fanat- 
ical—is terrifying. Its activity is titanic, over- 
whelming, bewildering; and the faces of its 
people seem hurried, worried, and weary. 
Rushing to and fro, always going, doing, plan- 
ning, they are unable to be still—smitten with 


52 Preaching in New York 


the strange disease of modern life, its sick 
haste. 

Here in this brilliant, splendid city even the 
night brings no repose, no hours of stillness. 
Its people are work-drunk; pleasure-mad. It is 
an obsession—like a man who thinks he is made 
out of fried eggs and cannot sit down except 
upon a piece of toast. It injures the home, 
making it little more than a hotel, and is the 
secret of much marital woe. It is reflected in 
our literature, in which we have fragments, 
glimpses of life, rather than a vision of the 
whole; observations not interpretations—a 
photograph, not a painting. It infects the 
religious life. The art of meditation is well 
nigh lost, for lack of time to practice it. 

Life in New York goes at a killing pace, and 
its tension tightens. No wonder the values of 
life are lost in the pell-mell medley of clattering 
activity. Even the man in the pulpit, harried 
by the peril of being always busy, finds his 
vision blurred by the clouds of daily dust, and 
the still small voice drowned by the din and 
hum and litter of his days. Evermore he must 
seek refuge with the Quietists, lest as the 
Wages of Hurry he lose his soul! 


The New America 53 


April 14.—Religious work of a Protestant 
kind on Manhattan Island is an adventure these 
days, since only a little more than seven per cent 
of its population are of that persuasion. Neigh- 
borhoods shift swiftly, baffling the shrewdest 
forecast ; and a church often finds itself a lonely 
island in an alien sea. Old families break up 
or move away, and the young people seek the 
suburbs to rear their families. Homes give 
way to hotels, apartments, and boarding-houses, 
—poor substitutes,—making the tie between 
home and church tenuous. Many who come 
from smaller communities, not finding the old 
informal fellowship in the city, abandon the 
Church, or else become “church tramps.” 
Vacations lengthen and the church year 
shortens. The glitter of the city fascinates, its 
rush and hurry wear the nerves—making the 
“dear City of God” seem dreamlike and remote. 
What will be the fate of our city churches— 
except those that stand on old foundations— 
is hard toknow. No ordinary methods of work 
apply, yet the need of spiritual fellowship in the 
“crowded loneliness” of city life is appalling. 
Some of our customs try me, especially the 
funerals at night, as if in our neck-and-neck 


54 Preaching in New York 


race for the nickel we did not have time to pay 
respect to our dead. No wonder Jesus wept 
over a city, knowing its brutality, its black 
wickedness, its nameless possibilities, and its 
aching pathos! 


April 18.—Dr. Holmes thought that preach- 
ers are in danger of becoming heathens for 
lack of religious instruction; and, as the old 
country preacher said of St. Paul, “I fully agree 
with him.” Anyway, I make it a point to hear 
preaching, and one of my shrines is the “Sky- 
scraper Church,” as the Broadway Tabernacle 
is called. There, for more than twenty years, 
one of the greatest living preachers has kept 
the light of God aglow amid the glitter of 
Broadway. Dr. Jefferson distrusts oratory,— 
he so fears unreality,—yet he is one of the 
noblest of orators, if one stops to think about 
it, having an amazing gift of lucid, fitly col- 
ored, persuasive speech. At first, he gives one 
an impression of austerity; but as he begins to 
speak, his rugged face is illumined by an inner 
brightness, and one forgets everything,—even 
the preacher himself,—and remembers only the 
Master. He takes us captive unawares, show- 


The New America 55 


ing us the beauty of the Gospel and the mean- 
ing of our fleeting lives, our duty for to-day, 
and our hope for the morrow. It is an unique 
eloquence, simple, soft-spoken, searching; and 
if the ear is sensitive, one hears an undertone 
of pathos—as of one in whom faith and hope 
dwell at peace with pity and acquaintance with 
grief. Whata ministry for this gay and giddy- 
paced city—rich in culture, lofty in ideal, tender 
in comfort, valiant for righteousness! If some 
great Angel could gather the testimonies of its 
influence, what a record it would be! 


Mv 3.—Attended a meeting designed to 
discuss the religious training of the young for 
an hour on a week day. Such meetings make 
the cynic rise in me, asking whether it is be- 
cause the Angel of Wisdom has been so busy 
on some other planet that religious education 
has gone so awry here below. There is a type 
of training which Dr. Holmes fitly described 
as pathological piety, rich in tuberculous 
virtues. There is the merely mechanical 
variety, enforced by discipline without joy, and 
thrown off as soon as passing years make a way 
of escape. There is the opposite error of too 


56 Preaching in New. York 


great vagueness; not over-feeding, but under- 
nutrition. As between old-fogyism and new- 
faddism, we flounder. Yet there must be some 
way of giving our children the truths that make 
us men,—simple as the speech of home, sweep- 
ing as the contour of the sky,—bringing 
memory, habit, and example to the nurture of 
the highest life. Surely this is the one eternal 
education; and yet we fall short of it both in 
content and in method. 

Men are materialists because, in the critical 
period of adolescence, one doorway of the spirit 
after another was allowed to close through 
neglect, until at last they came to regard the 
world of men and affairs as the only reality. 
Thereafter they live in an Euclidian world of 
three dimensions, “untroubled by a spark,” 
fancying that they are wise, whereas they are 
only hard and half blind. This atrophy of 
spirituality at the very time when the spiritual 
world ought to be near and real, is the saddest 
tragedy of life; and the fault lies equally with 
the home and the church. How can the transi- 
tion be made from the vivid, radiant faith of 
the child to the religion of the adult, without 
loss of the precious vision that interprets life? 


The New America (s/ 


May 12.—Years ago I wrote a rather long 
essay on “Realism in Religion,” the intent of 
which was to show that the mystics, so far 
from being visionaries, are the only true real- 
ists, in that they deal directly and at first-hand 
with reality. My thesis was that if it is possi- 
ble for man to reach reality at all, the masters 
of the spiritual life have attained it; else we 
wander in a world of phantoms. Greatly dar- 
ing, I sent the essay to William Dean Howells. 
In reply he said that he really thought I had 
made out a good case, and he was minded to 
print the essay. Howbeit, as a lad of twenty, 
I got stage fright and asked him not to do so. 
Something I had said about William Blake 
drew from him a few grave and simple words, 
showing his own attitude in these high matters. 
Those words returned to me to-day, now that 
his gracious, wise and gentle spirit has passed 
to where, beyond these shadows, there is Light. 


May 14.—Alas and alack, the Inter-Church 
World Movement seems to be on the rocks. It 
was a daring adventure, but ill-advised both as 
to time and method; an attempted advance in 
an hour of reaction. The undertaking came too 


58 Preaching in New York 


late, at a time when sect means more than 
church, and party more than country. There 
is a revival, but, alas, it is a revival of national- 
ism in politics and of sectarianism in religion. 
Besides, the leaders are too far in advance of 
the rank and file. The emphasis on money, as 
if with enough millions the world could be re- 
deemed, was unfortunate. It looked like a bar- 
gain to buy a Day of Pentecost. What is 
sadder still, its collapse will set back organized 
co-operative effort a generation. It was propa- 
ganda, not evangelism; and public opinion can- 
not be manipulated into a Christian mood. In 
the life of the spirit size does not signify, num- 
bers do not count, and money is not important. 
No amount of machinery can bring new visions, 
new leaders, and a new creative spirit. Jesus 
had no machinery, no money; but He did more 
for the soul of man than all of us put together. 

What we fail to get clear is the relation be- 
tween the spiritual and the practical. Every- 
where this hiatus confronts us, making it diff- 
cult to pass from the spiritual factor to the 
practical undertaking. We think of the “spirit- 
ual” either as an inherent quality in things to 
be brought out, or a glamour floating about 


The New America 59 


them ; something that can be spread, like butter, 
on things, or extracted, like honey, out of them. 
Which shows how firmly material-mindedness 
still clings to us. To be “practical” we feel 
that we must deal with material plans and rem- 
edies, and for a man to pin his faith to spiritual 
influences, is to have himself written off as a 
visionary or, worse still, a mystic. Hence a 
strange mishandling of the spiritual factor, be- 
cause material-mindedness holds the field. We 
lower the spiritual to the level of a force— 
potent, it may be, but too elusive for practical 
affairs—whereas it is everywhere the spiritual 
that creates the practical, and would shape it 
if we were brave enough to trust it. “Not by 
might, not my power, but by my Spirit!” 


May 18.—Everyday I read in the paper a 
“four-minute” essayette by Dr. Frank Crane; 
and they always make me “stop, look, and 
listen,” like the sign at the railway crossing. 
He is the same man I used to hear and admire 
years ago when he was a Methodist preacher; 
the same in spirit, only his method is different. 
In those days he wrote a book entitled, The 
Personal Influence of God, rich in insight and 


60 Preaching in New York 


warm with human heart-beats. Then he spoke 
to thousands; now he writes for millions. “It’s 
the knack as does it,” said a woman in a George 
Eliot story. For he is still a preacher, and one 
is sure to find a text hidden somewhere down 
the page, ranging from St. Paul to the exegesis 
of an event. Aware of the allurement of a 
striking title, he is master of a terse, crisp 
phrase-craft, and he knows the art of apt 
allusion. His phrases grip and stick, but seldom 
sting. There is about him the freshness of the 
open-air, a sense of beauty and wonder, and a 
human touch. It means much to set people 
thinking right for the day, to give hurrying men 
a bit of cheer, a touch of vision, a glint of the 
Eternal in the midst of busy days. He is a 
great everyday preacher, engaged in the blessed 
business of cheering us all up. 


May 21.—Spent yesterday down in New 
Jersey, where flows the Rancocas, visiting one 
of my shrines—a quaint little brick cottage at 
99 Branch Street, Mount Holly. It was built 
by John Woolman for his daughter Mary, when 
she married John Comfort, in 1771. The 
Friends bought it, along with two acres of gar- 


The New America 61 


den, as a Woolman Memorial, in 1915; and for 
me its worn door-step is a holy place. There 
fell the feet of the one man of our New World 
—a simple, quiet, Puck-like tailor—worthy of 
rank among the saints of the Church universal. 
In the phrase of the Friends, he ‘underwent 
deep baptisms ;”’ how deep, his Journal reveals 
in words as simple as the prayer of a child. 
Daringly radical, divinely gentle, he was a sen- 
sitive, suffering humanist who felt in his heart 
the woes of mankind; yet he kept always “an 
inward stillness and happy humility of heart.” 
Early he had a “concern” about slavery—food 
cooked by slaves he could not eat—and went to 
and fro among the Friends, an embodied con- 
science, until they became ill at ease about “‘the 
holding of fellow-men as property.” 

A quietist in faith, Woolman was a crusader 
in his labor in behalf of liberty, purity, and 
peace—a man to know whom is to find it easy 
to believe in Jesus. “Get the writings of John 
Woolman by heart,” said Charles Lamb, who 
more than once pays tribute to the gentle saint. 
Besides the Journal, in which we read the story 
of his inner life, there are a number of essays, 
like the one entitled ““A Word of Remembrance 


62 Preaching in New York 


and Caution to the Rich,” which show that he 
was one of the first to plead for justice in in- 
dustrial relations. Masterman has an essay on 
“Chicago and St. Francis ;” some one ought to 
write another of John Woolman and Broadway. 
It was a day of blessing, driving back the gray 
fog of cynicism which envelops us in these days. 


May 23.—Went to see a collection of old 
time dime novels, including all the ‘‘classic” 
Diamond Dick dead-shot stories, in the Public 
Library. It was expected that there would be 
a rush of boys to read the adventures of Hair- 
breadth Harry and his pals. But evidently the 
old thrillers do not thrill the new boys—not a 
boy turned up. Instead, only men, middle-aged 
men—dignified, gray-headed—came slyly, as if 
it were still forbidden, to inspect the treasures. 
“Tt’s like renewing youth,” said a bewhiskered 
pirate, as he looked fondly at the Beadle books 
which made his heart beat like a drum in days 
that come not back. 

Out in the park a group of old men were 
sunning themselves and swapping yarns—the 
kind who doze over papers in the Library, 
haunt the park benches, and sleep heaven 


The New America 63 


knows where at night. All were well over 
sixty, varying in type from a dapper, sprightly 
old gentleman with ruddy cheeks and a polka- 
dotted scarf, to a rather ragged, unshaven old 
man whose hair would have been whiter had 
it been washed. But in the fraternity of the 
park class distinctions are unknown, and they 
were happy together—no matter what the mor- 
row might bring. 

The dapper old man was holding forth, tell- 
ing of the golden days when he was young 
and his journey to the South Seas, while a 
small Italian bootblack was shining his elastic- 
sided shoes, stopping the while to listen, his 
dark eyes looking up into the old face. It was 
a tableau, and the story lost nothing in the 
telling. The shine finished, he waited for the 
story to end, and then arose and went his way. 
As he passed me I smiled and he grinned, and, 
pointing with his thumb over his shoulder, 
said: ‘Some nut!” 


May 25.—What strange notes one hears in, 
the poetry of to-day, in which young men—old 
before their time—are asking the ultimate ques- 
tion, ““What’s the use?” Either they have lost 


64 Preaching in New York 


sleep, have a sluggish liver, or do not get the 
right things to eat; else they would not an- 
nounce so lugubriously that human life is not 
really significant, and hardly worth the living. 
They have prematurity, not maturity; and they 
are as solemn as owls. They sing as if a dry- 
rotted world were crumbling about them, and 
their souls were falling apart. They have 
nothing to live on except a few hard stoic 
maxims, and their poetry is a mingled query 
and protest, because, forsooth, the valet service 
in this All-Men’s-Inn is not of the best, and 
truth and beauty and divine reality are not 
brought to the door before breakfast on a silver 
platter. 

Away with such prophets of futility; young 
men who despair of life before they have lived 
at all, and move like pale wraiths in a robust 
world were there is truth to seek, evil to fight, 
and love to win. They are decadents, invalided 
out of the ranks before they even see the front- 
line trench, must less the battle scene—whining 
because the world is not as dainty as a pink tea 
and safeasa nursery. What we need is a great 
poet to do for us what Browning did for our 
fathers—set our hearts a-tingle and aglow; 


The New America 65 


such a singer as Stevenson describes in his 
unpublished lines: 
Away with funeral music—set 
The pipe to powerful lips— 


The cup of life’s for him who drinks, 
And not for him that sips. 


June 2.—Have been to Ellis Island studying 
our imported Americans; and it makes one 
think. One does not actually see the immi- 
grants disembark, as in the old days; they are 
saved such embarrassment by passing directly 
from the boat through underground passage- 
ways into the main building for medical in- 
spection. If they are physically fit, they are 
directed with their bags, bundles and babies 
into the large auditorium. Huge American 
flags hang from the railings, and each alien, as 
his name is called, steps forth, led by an in- 
terpreter, to be finally examined before passing 
out. How timid and obsequious they are to the 
officers, as they had need to be in the lands they 
left. 

Meantime, eager friends and relatives, who 
have obtained passes to the Island, sit in the 
waiting-room opposite, talking in many tongues 
and with much gesticulation. The moment 


66 Preaching in New York 


word comes that some one has passed, they rush 
to the Kissing Post, as it is called, where more 
pent-up emotion finds release than on any spot 
on earth. Laughter, tears, and unintelligible 
exclamations mingle in reunions after long 
parting, and sorrow is turned to joy. The con- 
trast between the newcomers, with their shawls 
and rough shoes, and their alert, well-dressed 
relatives who meet the boats, is very striking. 
It makes one wonder at what America does for 
those who seek its shores. Within a few years 
the newcomers will walk erect, dress neatly, and 
their kiddies will be singing in our schools. 

No wonder they sell all they have, break old 
ties, and make adventure, seeking a more kindly 
fatherland. Alas, what disillusionment awaits 
many of them, what loneliness and homesick- 
ness, as they are herded together in a quarter 
or colony, and hear themselves called “wops,” 
or “ginneys,” or “kikes,’”’ as if they were to be 
always aliens. What wonder that some of them 
grow indifferent to American ideals; we do not 
show them any. They must be friends, not 
foreigners. It is not so much a matter of up- 
lifting the poor, benighted foreigner, as of 
teaching our own people what should be a plain, 


The New America 67 


human duty to the strangers within their gates. 
Americanism is not a formula; it is a friend- 
ship. 


June 3.—Some of the folk I saw at Ellis 
Island yesterday haunt me, especially the face 
of one old woman, so gentle, so sad; such a face 
as one often sees among the old people on the 
Fast Side. It was a face charged with a pathos 
too great for one mortal life, telling of the harsh 
attrition of foregone generations. Moulded 
after a noble design, in pure lines, the broad 
forehead, the mouth firm, drooping, yet tender ; 
a face in which Nature, the great tragic 
dramatist, had carved the sorrows of a race. 
Its chief feature was the eyes, large, dark, 
haunting, a little dulled by the film of years, as 
if the vision were inward rather than outward; 
eyes that brooded over their own depth, and 
saw things that were far away. She was 
startled at first when I smiled at her; then the 
deep lines in her face filled with the glow of a 
sunny kindness. There she sat, her bags at her 
feet, her hands—old, blue-veined, hard with 
toil—crossed in her lap, waiting at the gates of 
America. 


68 Preaching in New York 


June 15.—If one lives in New York, one does 
not need to travel; the world is at our doors. 
Just turn to the right from Chatham Square, 
and you are in—Chinatown! It is a different 
world; its very silence has a foreign sound, as if 
its citizens walked in felt-soled shoes. The 
streets are almost as narrow as the sidewalks, 
and are so crooked that one of them—Pell 
Street—describes a semicircle, and, with true 
Oriental courtesy, brings you back where you 
started. There is a feeling of something sin- 
ister, stealthy, prowling, suggesting melo- 
dramas of opium dens and highbinders, and one 
looks into dim alleys and dark hallways; but 
that is all imagination. For, if you expect to 
find an opium dive, you are more likely to run 
into a poker-game! 

At No. 5 Mott Street stands a new building 
containing the new Joss House and the Oriental 
Club, devoted to Americanizing its members; 
on the top floor a newspaper office—a daily pub- 
lished twice a month! In the Joss House the 
great carved wood altar is covered with vases 
of bronze and cups full of joss sticks, a row of 
candles giving a theatrical touch to the scene. 
Quietly, piously the worshipper enters, lights 


The New America 69 


his incense stick, burns his quota of sacred 
money, pours out a few drops of rice wine, 
repeats his formula, bows his face to the floor, 
and departs—having paid his debt to the gods. 
Outside a carryall full of loud-voiced tourists 
passes, and a party of society folk a-slumming. 

The streets are gay and odd enough at any 
time—hung with shields and banners in place 
of signs—and the shops are devoted to celestial 
foodstuffs, pottery, jewelry, porcelains, ivories, 
silks, fans, screens, idols, and—laundry sup- 
plies. On festal days they bloom with yellow 
silk pendants, lanterns, and tasseled cloths, mak- 
ing a patch of color in the crazy-quilt pattern 
of New York. 


July 2—Went to Broadway Tabernacle to 
hear Dean Brown, of Yale; and he spoke a word 
for the hour. Taking as his text the scene of 
Elijah under the juniper tree making request to 
die, he showed how the Divine physician seeks 
to heal us of the dismay, akin to despair, that 
haunts us in these dispiriting days. First, God 
gave the prophet something to eat; then He put 
him to sleep; then another meal. When rested 
of his fatigue, he was told to go forth and stand 


70 Preaching in New York 


before the Lord, who gave him a new task. 
Things are never so bad as we think they are 
when we are weary and overborne. Elijah 
thought he stood alone, whereas there were 
seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to 
Baal. It was all so simple, so human, so wise 
withal and winsome. No wonder the Dean has 
so rich a ministry; he is a teacher of preachers 
by example as well as by precept. There were 
no chips in the sermon, no shavings. It was 
clear-cut, forthright, fortifying, and one forgot 
the fine art of his homiletics. While never fall- 
ing into slang, he spoke the familiar language 
of everyday, with now a glint of humor, and 
now a flash of insight into the lonely places of 
the soul. Like Dolly Winthrop in the George 
Eliot story, we went away “all set up” for the 
week. 


July 10.—According to our Constitution it 
seems that we have to go clean crazy once in 
every four years, when we elect a President. 
The hysteria and hub-bub of the hour, the swirl- 
ing oratory, the thought-saving slogans, the 
awful Wilson-phobia, are unmistakable signs 
that the fever is now upon us. How strange 


The New America 71 


that folk otherwise sane become victims of de- 
lusions, megalomanias, and every kind of lunacy 
when they act in groups, and especially as na- 
tions. Until we attain to something like col- 
lective sanity, anything may happen, and war 
will never be far away. Thinking in a passion 
is like playing with dynamite. As for the can- 
didates, it is six of one and a half dozen of the 
other ; but most of our Presidents have revealed 
their greatness after they entered office. What 
one misses more than anything else in the pub- 
lic life of to-day is that fine thing—delicate but 
strong—never better described than by the 
wise philosopher who edits Life, whose business 
it is to shoot folly on the fly: 

“What is the spiritual quality? It is not 
piety in the common sense of it; it is not neces- 
sarily religiousness; but though it may be con- 
sistent with any kind of religion, I do not under- 
stand that it can be consistent with none. It 
is consistent with money-getting and with in- 
difference to money; with ambition and with 
modesty; with great powers and lesser ones, 
but hardly with stupidity, for it is itself a 
quality of intelligence. Let us call it a grasp 
of certain great truth$, the knowledge of which 


72 Preaching in New York 


is revealed to some babes and denied to some 
learned; which comes more by conduct than by 
study, and more, perhaps, by breeding and the 
grace of God than either. Emerson had it. 
Lincoln had it. McKinley had it, and the 
shrewd Hanna recognised it in him. Able men 
lacking or losing this quality cease to be able to 
inspire, and fail of leadership.” 


July 29.—Death is a ruffan! Now it has 
taken William Marion Reedy, and something 
fine and lovely went with him out of the world. 
He was a man made to be loved, brave, true- 
hearted, generous, his humor a gentle ridicule 
of his own pathos—my dear friend these twenty 
years. St. Louis will be a lonesome town for 
me now, remembering his huge figure and his 
dazzling mind, what times we talked the hours 
away. If he seemed to squander life, he did it 
lavishly, laughingly, and with a wide-sweeping 
sympathy which is another name for religion. 
As a bookman I have never known his like. He 
seemed to have read everything and to have for- 
gotten nothing. His ability to recall a scene, a 
character, an epigram in a story or play years 
gone by, was amazing. His criticisms were not 


The New America 73 


only appreciative, but creative, and a volume of 
them would be a treasure. Years ago I edited 
a little book of his essays entitled The Litera- 
ture of Childhood—dainty, wistful, elfin in 
spirit—showing that he had kept the child- 
heart, despite the tramp of heavy years. The 
man was reflected in his paper, The Murror, 
revealing a mind alert, keen, beauty-loving, far- 
ranging, watching, now with indignation, now 
with amusement, and always with pity, the 
often strange medley of human events. Every- 
thing that he wrote, even a postcard, had the 
artist stroke. “I am tired,” he said in his last 
letter: 


And now on tired eyes 
There softly lies 
The stillest of all slumbers. 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway’” 


September 17.—Yesterday a huge bomb was 
exploded in front of the Sub-Treasury Build- 
ing in Wall Street, leaving death and wreck in 
its path. Who did it and why no one knows, 
but it sent a shudder of horror through the 
city. To-day our Chapter of the Sons of the 
American Revolution marched to the spot, 
where we are wont to celebrate Constitution 
Day. The line formed at St. Paul’s Church— 
our oldest house of prayer—led by two com- 
patriots dressed in the garb of 1776, with fife 
and drum, and wended its way through a vast, 
excited throng to Trinity Church—where 
Hamilton lies buried—thence down Wall Street 
to the steps of the Treasury Building, under the 
shadow of the statue of Washington, on the 
spot where he took his oath of office. There, 
beside a river of humanity—literally a flowing, 
swirling river of faces—we performed our 
sacrament of citizenship, in defiance of anarchy 


and crime, pledging our souls anew to the Con- 
74 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway” ahs 


stitution as the basis of law and ordered life 
in our Republic; the bulwark against which the 
anti-social forces beat in vain! 


October 10.—If anyone would see Nature in 
all its multi-colored loveliness—ripe, mellow, 
and touched with the pathos of vanishing things 
—let him take a journey down the Hudson from 
Poughkeepsie in October. The trees are clad 
in their most gorgeous raiment—like a final 
ceremonial before the advent of winter—some 
of them in robes of flame which, like the Burn- 
ing Bush, glow without being consumed: now 
pale yellow, now dusky red, against a back- 
ground of ever-greens. The oak does not affect 
a garish attire, but a modern bronze. The dif- 
ferent kinds of maples wear different shades of 
crimson and feathery gold, while the birches put 
on bright yellow; and as the breeze strikes them 
and scatters their leaves, one thinks of the 
Tennyson line: “And the flying gold of ruined 
woodlands drove through the air.” Here and 
there a tall blasted tree covered with creepers 
glows like a torch, as though the lightning flash 
which withered it had got tangled forever in 
its spectral branches. The fold of the hills, the 


76 Preaching in New York 


rugged cliffs, the majestic winding river, and 
over all the solemn splendor of autumn—it fills 
one with a wild, sad joy for which words were 
never made, like a sacrament in praise of the 
Eternal Beauty! 


October 15.—It is always a joy to hear Dr. 
Felix Adler who, for more than forty years, 
has been a seeker after “the secret of the good 
life,” both as to its philosophy and its practice. 
Bred in the austerities and depths of Hebrew 
faith, he fell under the spell of the ethics of 
Kant touched by the teachings of Jesus, and the 
result was a fine, firm, ethical mysticism, worth 
more to his country than many battleships. His 
system is now set forth in a stately volume 
entitled, dn Ethical Philosophy of Life, aglow 
with a passion for righteousness, rich in 
spiritual gleanings, surveying the whole field 
of human relations. It is a new version of the 
Golden Rule: “So act as to elicit the unique 
personality in others and thereby in thyself.” 
Still, it is a philosophy, not a gospel; the will 
to religion, without the power of reconciling 
duty and joy. There is struggle, discipline, and 
moral passion, but not the emancipating vision. 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ ry 


October 18.—Went to hear a lecture on 
“How to Control the Subconscious Mind,” and 
learned many things. From what I can gather, 
after reading Freud and Jung, we do need a 
policeman in the basement. Once only a store- 
room, the Subconscious has become the seat of 
morality, the custodian of health, and the 
arbiter of fate. Whether friend or fiend, is un- 
certain; it knows no rest and does its works 
while we sleep. Though apparently om- 
niscient, it has curious streaks of stupidity. 
The way to control it, according to the lecturer, 
is by auto-suggestion; that is, by saying a thing 
over and over,—like beating a tom-tom,—until 
the subconscious mind gets the idea. As Punch 
once put it,— 


There was a young man of Kilpeacon, 
Whose nose was as red as a beacon. 
But by saying, ‘It ’s white,’ 
Twenty times, day and night, 
He cured it, and died an archdeacon. 
What fads people will take up, willing to turn 
themselves into automata rather than undergo 
the effort and discipline needed to organise the 
inner life. Surely it is not the Subconscious, 


but the Divine Conscious, of which we must 


78 Preaching in New York 


lay hold, if we are to live in “the glory of the 
lighted mind.” 


October 20.—As I listened last night to Mr. 
Root on the League of Nations, the words of 
Roosevelt were in my mind: “The greatest 
man that has arisen on either side of the 
Atlantic in my lifetime.” It was a large re- 
mark, and must not be taken too literally, like 
his estimate of himself as “a mediocre intellect 
highly energised.” It was a very impressive 
scene—a little gray man, speaking in quiet, 
measured words, and a vast audience listening 
as to an oracle. It used to be a saying in New 
York: “If you loot, see Root, before you 
scoot; which was a tribute to his acumen as an 
attorney. Since then he has had great causes 
and whole nations for his clients; but he is still 
an attorney—having all the handicaps that go 
to make up wisdom, but lacking the seer-like 
mind. Yet it means much to have a mind of 
such gravity, sanity, and clarity devoted to the 
public service. For thirty years or more he has 
lived at the centre of affairs, without yielding 
to cynicism. Time has mellowed his spirit, 
making him more magnanimous; but one misses 


““Bagdad-on-the-Subway’’ 79 


in him a rare thing not easily defined. Manner, 
magnetism, wit? Call it, rather, the spiritual 
quality, the poetic touch, the haunting accent 
that moves the heart. Men admire Elihu Root; 
they loved John Hay. 


November 2.—The Hard Church of modern 
times has suffered a loss of poetry, no less than 
of piety, by letting the day of All Souls drop 
out of its calendar. More winsome, more 
humane is the older faith, as in those parts of 
Ireland where old and sweet customs are not 
forgotten. There, as Kettle once said, in every 
cottage and farm house the hearth will be 
clean-swept and a new fire laid down, with a 
chair set before it for every member of the 
family who has passed out of shadows into 
realities. For it is believed that they are 
privileged to revisit to-night the place of their 
childhood. “Dead names will be cried about 
the winds—the names of those who achieved, 
the names of those who were broken or who 
broke themselves. Not a heart but about its 
portals will flutter a strange drift of memories; 
for it is the Day of all the Dead.” If religion 


80 Preaching in New York 


is poetry believed in, surely here is a touch of 
beauty, pity, and piety. 


November 4.—Spent an evening with 
Eamonn de Valera, and found him a man of 
real power and charm—much more, methinks, 
than a mere doctrinaire. Tall, somewhat 
angular, he might easily be awkward, if not 
austere, and his keen eye and square jaw show 
the fighter. Winsome and gentle-hearted, one 
gets an impression of character made firm by 
loyalty to a principle. When he talked of Ire- 
land, there was a light in his eyes which re- 
vealed what reverence and devotion really are. 
Asked what he would do with Home Rule if 
and when he got it, he said the first thing would 
be to declare Ireland independent and free. 
Such men are easily misjudged, but his sincerity 
is unmistakable. Patriots are rebels till they 
triumph—then they are heroes. The evening 
left me asking a question like that of Pilate, 
only in a different mood: What is wisdom? 
Where are we to draw the line between an erect, 
unbending devotion to an ideal, and an adapt- 
able attitude, which deals with facts, takes half 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 81 


a loaf when it cannot get the whole, and 
achieves results? 


November 6.—Had a bite and a chat with 
Huneker at the Players. What an amazing 
man, alike for his vitality of body and his verve 
of spirit, his incredible knowledge, his sensitive- 
ness, his generosity, and, above all, his critical 
eye for the good. Asa romantic raconteur, he 
is supreme, and there is no one near him. Such 
talk—full of stories, pictures, flashing epi- 
grams, and news from every realm of art. 
Listening to him is like riding on an express 
train through a multicolored tangle-wood. 
Flaubert, Gautier, and Emerson are among his 
masters, and in music, Chopin and Bach. He 
thinks, as he writes, in terms of music. My 
suggestion that Paimted Veils ought to be 
reckoned among his sins evoked such a running 
critique of fiction as I never heard before in my 
life. 

Outside, in Gramercy Park, stood Quinn’s 
statue of Booth as Hamlet—lonely, pensive, 
heroic; and over the fireplace, inside, hung Sar- 
gent’s portrait of the Booth his friends knew 
and loved. We agreed that nearby there ought 


82 Preaching in New York 


to be a memorial to William Winter, the 
Plutarch of our stage and the greatest critic 
of the drama America has known. It was an 
hour of enchantment, made so by the gay heart 
and the glittering mind of my host. 


November 11.—Armistice Day, and what 
memories it evokes! They are gone, those 
years, dark, senseless, and confused—like the 
hideous shapes of some strange, horrible dream. 
It seems a century; and what did it come to? 
After two years we are just where we were, 
with no assurance that a like calamity will not 
befall us again. Did nothing happen to us in 
the night? Apparently not; everything seems 
to be the same as usual, only more so. Ruth- 
less, swinish selfishness reigns, finding expres- 
sion in the vulgar phrase: “I’m gonna get 
mine, see?” Another such war and the scrag- 
gly chaos we call civilisation will disappear ; 
but we have no time to bother about it. Unable, 
unwilling to untangle our thoughts, we walk in 
a world of chimeras and catch-phrases, refusing 
to face realities. Manifestly the old order is a 
wreck, but we go on make-believing that it is 
as good as ever. At times we bethink ourselves 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 83 


of our plight, till the first toy balloon floats by, 
and we go off after it, dancing jazz. Meantime 
many of our soldier boys are homeless, work- 
less, and distraught—the victims of an imper- 
sonal cruelty. Yes, we remember sentimentally, 
but we forget practically. ‘Gratitude is the 
Cinderella of the virtues.” 


November 24.—It has taken the Pilgrim 
Fathers almost a year to land this time—due, 
doubtless, to their advanced age; and a party of 
Britishers came over to help get them ashore. 
To-day we gave a farewell luncheon to the dele- 
gation, and like all such meetings since the war 
it was a bore. What struck me was the end- 
less flow of mealy-mouthed flattery, so sicken- 
ing to honest minds on both sides of the sea. 
Everybody seemed afraid that somebody would 
say something to the point. Mr. Harold 
Spender—author of a sugary biography of the 
Prime Minister—did venture “one frank 
remark,” to the effect that he thought America 
rather intolerant of minorities: an observation 
as old as de Tocqueville. Yet one ought to be 
grateful for even ‘‘one frank remark” on such 
occasions; it is more than we usually get amid 


84 Preaching in New York 


the gush and slush of after-lunch oratory, which 
nobody means and nobody believes. Why so 
much oily hypocrisy in our Anglo-American 
friendship, if it is real? Friends who cannot 
be frank are not real friends, in spite of all their 
tiresome talk about the things they have in com- 
mon. If only Dean Inge would write an Out- 
spoken Essay on the subject, it would clear the 
air of cant. It would mean some plain-speaking 
in public, as there is now in private; but there 
would be a better understanding, and a firmer 
basis for an honorable and enduring friend- 
ship. Anyway, we have good banquets, for the 
sake of which one is willing to endure the 


palaver.* 


* Since this entry was made Dean Inge has written an out- 
spoken article on the subject in the London Evening Standard, 
in which he lets us see realities. He puts it frankly: “It is 
doubtful whether we have improved matters by the mealy- 
mouthed flattery which we are accustomed to use in public, 
though not in private, when we speak of America.” There 
is a touch almost cynical in his remark that sheer necessity 
makes friendship with America the “sheet anchor” of British 
policy; a necessity based on the “knowledge that we could not 
defend Canada from invasion.” Which makes one feel that 
“the curious mixture of idealism and chicanery in the Ameri- 
can character,” is not peculiar to America. The article was 
refreshing in its honesty, but disappointing in its conclusions. 

Happily Chesterton recanted his solemn promise not_to 
write his impressions of America, and his book, What I Saw 
in America, is by far the best book ever written about America 
by an Englishman. “In international relations,’ he says, 

“there is far too little laughing and far too much sneering. 
I believe there is a better way which largely consists in 
laughter; a form of friendship between nations which is 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway’”’ 85 


November 28.—My English friends keep 
writing of New York as a glittering, heartless 
place, hoping that I may make my church a 
centre of friendliness in a cold city. Every 


actually founded on differences.” So he does not give us a 
“comedy of comparisons,” but a rollicking interpretation of 
what is most uniquely and distinctly American; describing all 
sorts of queer things with sparkling phrases, quips, conceits, 
prods, puns, and, of course, paradoxes, as for example: “The 
worst way of helping Anglo-American friendship is to be an 
Anglo-American.” He knows the sanctity of difference, and 
he never mistakes difference for inferiority. He seeks the 
meaning of things unfamiliar—some of his explanations being 
fearfully and wonderfully made—and what he cannot under- 
stand he adds to his stock of mystery stories. 

Writing in The New Witness, Mr. Belloc recalls that until 
our Civil War the English policy was hostile to America. The 
effort to divide and weaken America, having failed, the next 
move was to make friends with us. No sacrifice was thought 
too great, but it went too far, seeking an Alliance, which he 
regards as “a grave political error,” since England, in Alliance 
with America, would see herself forced to actions which would 
weaken her, and upon motives repugnant to the national char- 
acter—which is exactly what America thinks about it. Hav- 
ing “gone too far to draw back,” Mr. Belloc thinks that the 
present propaganda is doing injury to real friendship. Talk 
of “an English-speaking world’ does no immediate tangible 
harm, but carried into the real world of armies and navies, 
oil and iron, it means a heavy crash, as if one “should step 
out of a fifth-storey window through taking too literally the 
metaphor of ‘walking on air!” 

So the matter stands, the irritating Irish issue having 
been mercifully removed; and it was not greatly changed by 
the idealism of Lord Robert Cecil or the eloquence of Mr. 
Lloyd George, who paid us his long-promised visit, enchant- 
ing us with his picturesque personality, and, having given the 
Goddess of Liberty his autograph, returned happy and in 
good heart. My own conviction, as the result of sad experi- 
ence, is that the best service to Anglo-American friendship 
is to let it alone. If it is written in the Book of the Will 
of God it will grow—as, indeed, it is growing—and a nobler 
necessity than a fear of invasion or a desire for an Alliance 
will dictate a higher friendship. 


86 Preaching in New York 


city is cold and cruel,—not with the ferocity 
of a tiger, but with the indifference of a cart 
wheel, which rolls over a stone or a human 
head with equal ease,—New York not more so 
than London. Indeed, the frigidity of New 
York is only a pretense and a bluff, as Raggles 
discovered in the O. Henry story, “The Making 
of a New Yorker.” Nor does one have to be 
knocked over in the street, as he was, to learn 
that, underneath its glitter and show, it is 
almost foolishly warm-hearted. Half its people 
are from smaller communities and long for the 
old neighborliness—but dare not show it. 
They are like billiard balls in a game: they 
“kiss” and pass on, little knowing the pent- 
up kindness under the polished surface. 
New York is a huge mass of scrambled human- 
ity,—many races, creeds, colors,—but it is 
wistfully, pathetically human, after all. At 
the present rate, like Raggles I shall soon be 
saying “Noo York,” thinking that the sun 
rises in East River and sets in the Hudson. 


December 5.—Genius! It is a mystery; no 
one knows whence it cometh or whither it 
goeth. The rest of us follow the Drummer— 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 87 


it hears a still, small voice. No other magic 
could have wrought such marvels as Bliss and 
Other Stories, by Katherine Mansfield: she is 
not a comet, butastar. Her stories tell so little, 
yet mean so much. She knows the tremendous 
meaning of trifles—how a fugitive mood may 
change us more than a great event. She has 
a story called “The Wind Blows,” in which 
nothing happens, yet it makes the soul stand 
still and listen. A fragile thing it is, made up 
of bits of nothing—just a little grey wind, moist 
with soft mist, such as one may meet at any 
turn—yet it gathers into a few lines all the 
old heart-ache and homesickness of soul which 
made the Psalmist cry out, ages ago, “I am a 
stranger here, and a sojourner, as all my fathers 
were.” Yes, the wind blows; its sound is heard 
but its source is secret. 


December 10.—What a picture lower New 
York makes seen from the river on a crisp, 
frosty day, when the purple wing of evening 
brushes the grime away. On the left a sky of 
pearl and old silver; on the right the City, 
shrouded in violet haze, with row on row of 
lighted windows rising like fairy-palaces until 


88 Preaching in New York 


it seems fantastic, dream-like, unreal. It seems 
incredible that frail man should have uplifted 
such cliffs and peaks, here in shapes like stalag- 
mites, there in slender towers. Yet he has done 
so, making his masonry rival the mountains of 
God. The sun sinks, the fog deepens, and as 
the soft night falls over the scene the elevated 
trains look like sinuous, slow-moving comets 
gliding to and fro through a human Milky Way. 


December 18—A city lodging-house; a 
human waste-basket—a cemetery of the un- 
buried dead! There one sees such pathetic 
shapes as haunt the benches in the parks, list- 
less, dull-eyed, without energy, aim, or hope. 
Men lose heart, give up, let go, and drift like 
pieces of dead wood in a stream. Drudgery 
wears them out; disease and despair dog their 
steps. The Ledger reads like a Diary of De- 
feat, in which one finds such entries as these: 

J. B. Twenty years old. Began work at 
ten; worked steadily for eight years. Did not 
get ahead, seemed discouraged. Low vitality. 
Gave up. Passed on.” 

“W.H. Twenty-eight; Pennsylvania. Be- 
gan work at nine, as dog in glass works. 


_“Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 89 


Steady for seven years; gave out. Restaurant 
work three years. Tramping since. Power 
gone.” 

It is a forlorn procession, a shambling, 
shuffling, aimless march to a drab and dingy 
end. They wander through the streets, the liv- 
ing dead, whose weary eyes tell that they had 
a brother Cain. Perhaps, if we knew the hearts 
of men as God knows them, we might read in 
the Ledger of Life an item like this: 

“J.P. Thirty-five. Began career at twenty; 
well educated. Worked ten years. Made 
money, but lost his ideals. Thought religion a 
good thing to subdue the masses. A model of 
fashion. Power gone. Passed on.” 


December 25.—History is eager with the 
effort of men to find a Happy Prince, whose 
power shall be gentle, wise, and just, and to 
establish Him in dominion over their broken 
lives and warring wills. Long ago they found 
Him; but all who find Him lose Him, though all 
have found Him fair. The eager dream came 
true when from a little town in Judea there 
came a Man of Good Will, the lover of the race. 
Each year, for a brief day, so swift to go, Lord 


go Preaching in New York 


Christ rules over us. Each year we give Him 
Christmas Day, permitting his will to prevail, 
and his brooding spirit to rest upon the nations. 
Toward that happy interlude we look forward 
longingly; and when it is ended, we look back 
lovingly to the time when we were good to- 
gether. Strife, anger, tumult, and the hurry 
of little days are forgotten. A while we dwell 
in his kingdom, and in his authority there is 
peace. Alas, the Day of Christ is gone while 
the welcome is still on our lips. He comes and 
He passes, because we are troubled about many 
things. If He might abide, it would be well 
with us, and pity and joy would walk the com- 
mon ways of man. 


January 5, 1921.—Went to hear a Socialist 
friend lecture, he having promised, of his own 
accord, not to snipe the church. He laid the 
idealism on thick, but it is no use. It is like 
whitewash; if you touch it, it rubs off. The 
trouble with socialism, like the individualism 
which it attacks, is that both work on a basis 
of materialistic thought, in terms of wealth, 
not of faith or of reason. Because socialism is 
a protest against an extreme individualism, its 


_“Bagdad-on-the-Subway” Ql 


advocates believe that they are idealists. They 
talk of the welfare of society; but so do the 
opposite school. The difference is one of 
method, not of ideal; for the real ideal of both 
is wealth. One emphasizes the production, the 
other the diffusion, of wealth; but it is wealth 
all the time. Neither seems able to rise above 
it. Both preach rights, and say little of duties; 
how expect man to do other than demand the 
one and ignore the other? And there we are, 
deadlocked between the falsehood of two ex- 
tremes. Unless we can find some fourth dimen- 
sion, the argument will go on forever and get 
nowhere, like the duel in the Chesterton story, 
The Ball and the Cross. Unless humanity can 
be moved from within by a higher spiritual im- 
pulse, we can never untie the tangle. Howbeit, 
there were good lines in the lecture, as when he 
said that “A living wage is one that keeps the 
soul of the employer alive.” 


January 10.—It has been a dark night all 
day; H died at dawn, going out with the 
morning star. What a stillness death makes 
when it passes by! Yesterday he was as gay 
and facetious as ever, albeit knowing that his 





Q2 Preaching in New York 


end was near. He gave mea paper to be read 
at his funeral, but not to be opened till needed. 
It would relieve me of embarrassment, he ex- 
plained. There would be less stupidity and ly- 
ing, he said, if every man wrote out, before 
dying, what he wished said. It makes a lump 
climb into my throat to read it, setting forth in 
simple words his faith about life and the world 
—a kind of spiritual pantheism, in which per- 
sonality as well as beauty transcends man. In 
our talk he always avoided such issues, and 
posed as an awful unbeliever. But I knew it 
was not so. He was of those whose faith hath 
centre everywhere, nor cares to fix itself in 
form. His life was his religion, and his pass- 
ing atriumph. Death was there, of course, but 
nobody minded him. King of Terrors? No, 
nor king of anything. A boy-like thing, I 
figured him, like the little genius of Greek art, 
waiting about to open the door. O, my friend! 


January 14.—New York is the rendezvous of 
our Young Intellectuals, to whom nothing old 
is sacred and nothing new unwise. They are 
an “unco-squad,” suffering from a Superiority 
Complex, but charming withal in their cock- 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 93 


sureness. They take themselves very seriously, 
and that makes no end of fun for the rest of 
us. They have the contortions of genius, if not 
its inspiration, and their casual omniscience— 
tricked out with a garish cleverness—makes a 
circus seem tame. The chief of the tribe is 
Mencken—a blend of Brann and Nietzsche, 
with a dash of Swift—who raids the bour- 
geoisie trenches on Broadway now and anon, 
exploding grenades and wit bombs, to an accom- 
paniment of Rabelaisian laughter. Next day he 
repeats the performance in Baltimore, hilarious 
and unashamed. Oddly enough, what fills him 
with unholy glee makes the others mad, sad, 
and disgusted. They find America crass, 
stupid, provincial—‘“‘So crude, don’t you know” 
—and they refer to it with sardonic scorn as 
“These Benighted States.” If there is anything 
they hate worse than Puritanism, it is Pro- 
hibition. Victorian romance is taboo; they go 
in for realism, by which they seem to mean 
emptying a garbage can in the parlor. It is 
the way of youth; it fills its belly with the east 
wind and blows the twisted bugle of revolt. 
One does not wonder that they rebel against 
the smug, timid, pious, prudish priggishness of 


Q4 Preaching in New York 


other days; but surely it is no advance if it 
ends in a gospel of futility, tempered by vulgar 
hedonism. 


January 20.—Went “down in Water Street” 
to the McAuley Mission; “dry dock of a thou- 
sand wrecks.” What a Carpenter-shop for the 
making and mending of men—broken men, 
pieces of men, “Ex-men,” as Gorky would say. 
They actually advertise for sots, bums, down- 
and-outs, and those who have lost hope—like 
Christ writing a “Want-Ad,” asking for the 
refuse of the world. And around Him, as He 
predicted, are gathered a strange, weary, for- 
lorn company of men whom life has defeated— 
the sick of soul, the palsied of will, the demon- 
haunted—seeking, as of old, His healing touch, 
His forgiving word, His hand put forth in the 
darkness, which tells them that they may still 
hope, for the impossible is true! It is like read- 
ing an old page from the Gospels, or a new 
chapter from the Acts of the Apostles. 


January 22.—Heard a good story about dear 
Robert Collyer, the memory of whom is like 
music, showing his wisdom and his humor. 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway” Q5 


When John Haynes Holmes came to the 
Church of the Messiah, the old man became 
pastor emeritus, and he was in his pew at every 
service. No two men could be more unlike, 
but the old saint was loyal to the young prophet. 
After a while, when some of the older folk 
began to be ill at ease under the newer teach- 
ing, one of them asked Collyer how he liked the 
new minister : 

“Fine, fine,” he said, “he is a bright young 
man, and he will do big things; we are very 
fortunate.” 

Not satisfied with such a reply, and feeling 
that there was something Collyer had not con- 
fessed, after a brief pause the questioner put 
the matter point-blank: 

“Honest, now, Doctor; don’t those sermons 
make the snakes run up and down your back?” 

“Yes, they do,” Collyer admitted, drawling 
out the answer. “But you just wait. After 
a while some young fellow will come along and 
make ’em run up and down his back, too!’ 


January 24.—Listening to Chesterton lecture 
is a joy undefiled, as much for his manner as 
for the niceties of his insight and his ever- 


96 Preaching in New York 


present humor. His huge figure, his shock of 
tousled gray hair, his accent, beginning a sen- 
tence in the treble key and sliding down, his 
shy, winning smile, captivate, the while he 
pricks our absurdities and pronounces prohibi- 
tion a violation of the constitution of the uni- 
verse. His second lecture, “Shall We Abolish 
the Inevitable?” was an annihilating analysis 
of the pervasive, easy-going fatalism which is 
nothing short of a curse. At the close of one 
of his lectures, a woman in the top gallery 
asked him why he used paradox in his writings. 
He expressed surprise, saying that he had 
searched his books in vain for a parodox, the 
quest having suggested a ereat epic poem to 
be entitled Paradox Lost. If he can help 
America to recover its lost sense of humor, he 
will be a benefactor; and he can do it by telling 
us what the London papers would say if the 
Autobiography of Margot Asquith had been 
written by an American woman!” 


January 27.—No church is more rich in its 
munificence, or more strategic in its labor to 
stem the tide of paganism in New York, than 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 97 


the Episcopal Church. Its missions are marvels 
of sagacious and prophetic Christian enterprise. 
For that reason all who labor in this diocese 
are deeply interested in the election of a new 
bishop; but it is a pity that we always have a 
big row and get all mussed up about it. As 
a partisan of the rector of Grace Church,— 
whose spiritual insight and literary charm have 
been among my blessings for years,—the result 
does not make me happy, save as a rebuke to 
the Anglo-phobes, who attacked Dr. Manning 
on the ground of his British origin; which is 
like excommunicating George Washington, who 
was a British subject before he became an 
American citizen. Let us hope the new Bishop 
will finish the slowly rising Cathedral of St. 
John the Divine,—about which James Lane 
Allen wove his lovely story, The Cathedral 
Singer,—and show us the function of a cathe- 
dral ina democracy. If only our varied fellow- 
ships could be united in one great communion, 
making the Cathedral a central shrine at the 
gates of the University, joining a Home of the 
Soul and a City of the Mind in the service of 
a many-tongued metropolis—is it only a dream? 


98 Preaching in New York 


January 28.—The annual dinner of the 
Poetry Society last night reminded me of the 
dim nights in London when we used to discuss 
the heavenly art between air raids. How in- 
teresting it is to meet singers whose faces you 
have never seen, but whose songs have opened 
windows of divine surprise toward the City on 
the Hill! Though I have long been a devotee 
in the Temple of Song, Le Gallienne, Rice, 
Kemp, Sara Teasdale, Elsa Baker, and Ina 
Coolbrith were among the members of the 
choir I had not met. Mukerji came near being 
the hero of the hour, with his story of the wan- 
dering poets of India, begging alms for which 
they pay in bits of wisdom and song. If we 
did not understand the meaning of the lines 
he recited, we felt the rhythm of the music. 
Markham, in his welcome to Tagore, said that 
in the Land of Poetry there is no East and 
West, but one cup of the universal communion. 
In the speech of Tagore one felt the ache of his 
heart in his words, as of one depressed, if not 
deeply wounded, by the mood of America. He 
pleaded for men of world-mind, who see that 
we are all citizens of one Kingdom of the Spirit, 
members of one Beloved Community. 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway’”’ 99 


February 4.—Every time I hear Rabbi Wise, 
it makes me want to play truant from my own 
church; he is so vital, so vibrant with intellectual 
power, so aglow with moral electricity—like a 
bit of human radium. ‘Tall, athletic, graceful, 
his dark brown eyes eagle-like in their bright- 
ness; his deep bass voice soft as velvet in appeal, 
and resonant in denunciation; his style bristling 
with epigrams, swift epitomes, and phrases that 
sting the mind with the surprise of beauty— 
his charm as an orator is equal to his daring 
as a prophet. One moment he is walking to and 
fro like a lawyer at the bar; another, he is 
exploding some injustice or absurdity with a 
quick sabre-thrust, with now a glint of humor 
and now a gleam of prophetic indignation. 

Emerson said that the man who speaks the 
truth will find life sufficiently dramatic. It has 
been so with Rabbi Wise, who early took for his 
motto: “I will try to see things as they are, 
and then I will try to say them as I see them.” 
His gallant fight for a free pulpit in a Free 
Synagogue is memorable in the religious life of 
America. As chivalrous as he is fascinating, 
in New York he is not only a personality but 
an institution,—admired, feared, and idolised 


100 ~+=Preaching in New York 


by turns,—a leader of his own people and a 
captain of the forces making for social justice, 
civic honor, and national idealism. 


February 11.—Spoke at a Settlement on the 
East Side, to a company made up largely of 
Jewish young people, the most intent and eager 
listeners I have had in many a day. My talk 
was about Lincoln, the emphasis being on the 
idea that we must support the State and not 
expect the State to support us. When question- 
time came, I learned that my audience did not 
agree with much that I had said, and they 
refuted me by quoting Karl Marx, whose writ- 
ings they knew, giving chapter and verse, 
chiefly from Das Kapital—using it as an 
authority much as theologians use the Bible. 
When we got away from Marx, and dealt with 
issues on their merits, they were not so certain, 
and I accused them of playing leap-frog over 
hard facts. The religious idea they dismissed 
with a sort of triumph, even with scorn. Not 
all of them were Marxians, and they had a 
picturesque debate among themselves, while I 
acted as umpire. Having told them that I pre- 
ferred Lincoln to Marx, I went away—wishing 


“‘Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 101 


the while that all young people had as keen an 
interest in public affairs. Alas, apart from 
making money and having a good time, so many 
of them seem to be dead from the eyes up. 


February 12.—A mountain is a mystery; 
such was Lincoln. It is tall, isolated, and alone; 
soishe. It has fissures and crevices that would 
disfigure the beauty of a hill, but which con- 
stitute no blemish on its massive nobility. Amid 
its crags are sheltered nooks where flowers 
bloom and streamlets flash in the sunlight. But 
there are also huge masses of denuded rock 
which tell of the harsh attrition of earlier times. 
The clouds that gather about its peak lend it 
an air of aloofness and melancholy. Mighty 
storms make war upon it, with the swift strokes 
of lightning and the deep cry of thunder. But 
it remains unchanged, unshaken. In all moods, 
in all mists, its mission is the same. The same 
God that made the mountain made the man, 
and His ways are past our finding out.’ 

*Lincoln is not simply a figure in our history; he is an 
article of our faith. For, strangely enough, of all those who 
have sat in the White House, no one has left such a legacy 
of spiritual eminence. Toward the end, when his thin, worn 


face looked like a mask of pale bronze, and his eyes, deep- 
sunk, became two pits of brooding shadow, men saw as in a 


102 +#Preaching in New York 


February 14.—How many influences play 
upon preaching. My sermon to-day simply did 
not go; something was wrong. Water in the 
carbureter, the spark dead, or something else. 
It was a fairly good sermon, and not ill-con- 
sidered, but it had no life, no fire, no power. 
When that is so, preaching is the hardest work 
on earth—harder than pounding rock on the 
street, or making brick without straw. It is 
strange and baffling. A dumb, dismal mood 
creeps out of the mists of the mind, and seals 
up the fountains of the spirit. One is helpless 
against it, unable to achieve release of person- 
ality. St. John was “in the Spirit on the Lord’s 
Day.” He trod on air, his feet walked among 
the stars. But perhaps on other days it was 
not so. God keeps His sacred wine for the 
ereat sacramental feasts of life. The wind 
bloweth where it listeth; to-day it was calm, and 
the oars were heavy. 


February 16.—Ruskin saw in Yorkshire, 
among the new buildings that covered its once 


vision that to which they entrust their souls.. Waldo Frank, 
in Our America, wrote golden words :—“A materialistic world 
saved by a religious man. A practical union saved by a poet. 
A rational society saved by the abiding love of a mystic. Here 
at last is our miracle.” 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 103 


wild hills, churches and schools mixed with 
mansions and mills. The churches were almost 
always Gothic, the mansions and mills never 
Gothic. When Gothic was invented, he remem- 
bered, homes were Gothic as well as churches. 
Why should it not be so now, since beauty is as 
cheap as ugliness? To-day we live under one 
kind of architecture and worship under an- 
other, because, he insists, we have one 
religion from life. 

No doubt; all the same it is a joy to pass from 
the hurry of Fifth Avenue into the Gothic 
beauty of St. Thomas’s Church, so massive and 
stately, so reverent and graceful. A poem in 
stone, a bit of the eternal mysticism made 
visible, it rests the soul, and renews a sense of 
wonder and awe—like distance in a painting, or 
a strain of music breaking through the racket 
of events. What a blessing it is, unveiling, for 
a moment, a long vista of the spirit where the 
Infinite woos the finite into its mystery. 


February 22.—Lord Dunsany in his drama, 
The Gods on the Mountain, tells how on top 
of a hill in remote India there once stood six 
green stone gods. Six beggars conceived the 


104. Preaching in New York 


idea of palming themselves off on the simple 
village folk as those six stone gods come to life. 
All of the villagers fell victim to the hoax, ex- 
cept two, who started off to see if the stone 
deities were still on the hill. Before they 
arrived, the gods had been stolen and carried 
away. Convinced that they had actually turned 
to living men, they hurried back to the village, 
and bowed low before the six beggars. Then, 
to their amazement, the six beggars turned to 
stone, and sat in a semi-circle—inert and solid. 

Some such fate has befallen Washington; he 
has been turned to stone, and his face looks 
like the Sphinx. Every human wrinkle has been 
ironed out of it, leaving a bloodless abstraction 
or a steel engraving. If only he would come 
to life and swear, or do something human, it 
would make him more real to us. As it is, he 
is hidden in a cloud of commonplaces, and our 
homage is apt to be perfunctory, in spite of 
ourselves. 


February 25.—Fifth Avenue, from Madison 
Square to the top of Central Park, is a fine lady, 
elegantly dressed and well mannered, the very 
pink of fashion, and with the way of one secure 


““Bagdad-on-the-Subway’”’ 105 


in her position and social standing. She has 
wealth and power, and the great churches she 
passes add dignity without solemnity to her de- 
portment. If her skirts are cut as befits the 
fashion,—alow or aloft,—she is no flirt like 
Broadway, much less what Wells calls a 
“painted disaster of the street; it is a differ- 
ence not of inches, but of intention. She moves 
with fair grace, but without striking sinuous- 
ness. She dines at the Waldorf, worships at 
Brick Church, St. Thomas’s, or the Cathedral, 
as her heart inclines, reads at the Public 
Library, and keeps a museum of art for her 
guests. If she smokes, it is in the seclusion of 
her stately clubs, any one of which would make 
the palace of an Oriental monarch look like a 
rummage sale. At times she is haunted, me- 
thinks, by the dread of horrible shapes of 
poverty hidden in the shabbiness into which the 
city shades off toward the East. It is a brilliant, 
gracious avenue, more high-heeled than high- 
browed, but kind-hearted withal; in short, a 
glorified Main Street. 


February 27.—The following words in a 
letter from a great banker touched me deeply, 


106 Preaching in New York 


and set me thinking how simple religion is in 
its real meaning and duty:—“I am very ill /at 
expression in religious matters, my creed being 
a plain and practical one. I think if every 
person would everyday do some kind act to some 
person other than themselves, the burden of the 
world would be lifted; and I try not to wait 
for the others to begin. And it seems to me 
that such a practice leads directly to spirituality. 
The step to realisation is such a short one, and 
the world is doing everything else but taking it. 
The millennium is next door to us, and we go 
the other way.” It is all there; no word need 
be added—a man could preach for an hour and 
not say as much as that. 


February 28.—Have been making a little 
study of “illicit preaching” in New York, in 
hotels and halls where all kinds of cults hold 
forth. What strange philosophies folk run 
after, drifting hither and yon, seeking magic 
and the moon—anything to tickle curiosity. 
Restless, troubled, hungry of heart, they take 


*Further along in these pages, in the form of a dialogue, 
I have ventured a more detailed description and discussion of 
this extraordinary phase of metropolitan life, which has not 
received the attention it deserves. 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 107 


refuge in the occult and the esoteric, in quest 
of some formula, some charm, to heal their ills 
and unify the disarray of the inner life. It 
would be grotesque if it were not so tragic— 
this search for power without discipline and 
salvation without sacrifice. 

Which was the more interesting, the audi- 
ences or the lecturers, is hard to know. Of 
course, the seekers after sensation were there, 
as everywhere; the kind of women who adore 
Wagner and Theosophy one week, and the next 
hang on the lips of the oldest shop-worn 
celebrity from Europe, or the newest boy-violin- 
ist. But most of the audiences were serious, 
earnest folk, to whom religion had evidently 
been only a tradition or a memory; and some 
of them had known bitter sorrow, for which 
they had found no healing. Wistful, unhappy, 
a-weary, it was pathetic to see them listening 
to strange, half-baked philosophies. 

Many of the lecturers were plain fakes, con- 
juring with the magic words, Health, Happi- 
ness, Success; harping upon variations of one 
theme: “How to Get What You Want.” One 
posed as “a curative psychologist and person- 
ality-builder ;’ another offered “healing in the 


108 Preaching in New York 


involuntary way;” and still another talked 
learnedly of ‘““The Hidden Giant’’—the Subcon-, 
scious—followed by “classes in Healing, Con- 
centration, and Prosperity.”’ Fortunately, a 
few of them were real teachers of spiritual 
truth, trying to help people to make use of 
spiritual energies in daily life. 

Each of these cults betrays some lack on the 
part of organized religion—chiefly its neglect of 
the mystical element—and the penalty of neg- 
lect is exaggeration. The tragedy of our time 
is the schism between the head and the heart, 
the divorce of science from mysticism; the 
failure to see that the inner life is a realm of 
law where order is the trophy of obedience. 
Alas, the church seems able to deal only with 
the intelligent, the prosperous, and the perfectly 
well; with the sick of body or of soul it is help- 
less. Has our religion nothing to say to 
physical beings who have a bodily life to live? 

Has the church no help for the sub-normal, 
the distressed, the over-borne, and those whose 
minds seem scattered by the dizzy whirl of city 
life? Has it no art of healing, no technique of 
inner realization? Before the church attacks 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 109 


these new cults, it ought to study how far its 
own failure to minister to human need has 
brought them into being. 


March 4.—To-day a great, lonely man passes 
from the White House into private life, broken 
in body but not in spirit, reviled and idolized by 
turns—a mighty soldier sadly wounded. His 
epigram will live: ‘I would rather be defeated 
in a cause that will one day triumph, than to 
triumph in a cause that will one day be de- 
feated.” So, appealing from the hour to the 
years, from mad passion to calm intelligence, 
he can wait while 


Desolation and battle, and long debate, 

Councils and prayers of men, 

And bitterness and destruction and witless hate, 

And the shame of lie contending with lie, 

Are spending themselves. 

Time, if not tragedy, will show that his in- 
sight was authentic; and his words, uttered with 
the dignity of a golden voice, will echo in the 
hearts of men. He may have been too plaint 
abroad and too unyielding at home; he may 
have been unfitted by temperament for team- 
work—trying to do it all off his own bat. But 
he alone had the spiritual touch, and his vision 


110 Preaching in New York 


will grow and abide, though, alas, his mortal 
eyes may not see its fruition. Wilson has won; 
Clemenceau is defeated ! 


March &8—No doubt Adam and Eve were 
wotried about the younger generation, as we 
are, despite their own expulsion from the Gar- 
den of God. Our young’ folk are as gay, as 
vivacious, as irresponsible and superficial as 
ever young folk have been; only more so. Like 
everything else, the old feud between youth and 
age was made acute by the war, which left the 
world neurotic, erotic, and in so many ways 
idiotic. Old restraints are thrown off, old 
standards have been upset, emptying the under- 
world upon the stage and into our fiction. 

At best the mood of youth is an engaging 
sauciness; at worst a downright defiance. 
Some are seekers after truth, more are seekers 
after thrills, and if a few affect to be con- 
scientiously unmoral, and at great pains to be 
flippant, all are adepts at the old game of 
Shock-My-Aunties. It is a new kind of hypoc- 
risy. Once bad folk pretended to be good; now 
the nicest kind of boys and girls pose as cynics, 
sceptics, and awfully wicked. It is mostly a 


‘“Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 111 


bluff, their interest in indecency being more 
childish and inquisitive than unwholesome. 

None the less, it is a mistake to think that 
youth is not serious just because it refuses to 
be solemn. A generation is growing up which 
has read little, but lived much. They despise 
books, as if they had actually heard of the 
famous phrase: “Reading is thinking with a 
strange head instead of your own.” Most of 
the past is not even a past for them; it is dead 
and gone—blotted out by the red mists of War. 
They have as much Christianity as is embedded 
in our social order, and that is very little. They 
have courage and honor; they have little faith 
and no theology. A gifted and high-minded 
young editor put it to me thus, recalling his 
austere up-bringing in New England: 

“It is like a nightmare to think of it. Sunday 
was as dismal as funeral. Joy was a sin, an 
idea an agony. Every happy impulse and in- 
stinct was trampled upon, suppressed, as if it 
were a thing vile and shameful. God was a 
big policeman always on watch with a club. 
Facts about sex were unclean, and I grew up 
in ignorance of my own nature. If one asked 
a human question, the old extinguisher was 


112 Preaching in New York 


brought out and applied. All inquiry about 
religion was squelched forthwith, as if one had 
touched a taboo. We had to swallow it whole, 
willy nilly, take it or leave it. Art was a blas- 
phemy and science and invention of the Devil.” 

‘No, it’s vall off,”) he’ added, *.“‘I’m: done. 
They got God and the Devil mixed. They put 
the war over on us, but they can’t put their 
religion across. They think we are a wild, god- 
less set. It may be so, if they mean their petty, 
fussy little God, who is harder to please than a 
spinster school-mistress. We are not irre- 
ligious, but we want reality. What is the 
church going to do about it? No preacher un- 
der forty can speak our language, and the 
young fellows shy at the pulpit. No, I don’t 
talk this to the old folk—they would not under- 
stand.” 

There was more of a sort similar, only more 
stinging, showing how repression had re- 
bounded into rebellion. And I “listened in,” 
agreeing with much of it, wondering the while 
how the younger generation could make a 
worse mess of the world than we have made 
of it. Anyway, it will soon be in their hands, 
and pray God the insight of Meredith may be 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 113 


fulfilled, when he saw that youth and age must 
unite “to rear the temple of the credible God.” 


March 12.—Somehow, in a most baffling 
fashion, one of the most famous ministers of 
New York rubs all my fur the wrong way; and 
it is not his fault. A brilliant speaker, a cap- 
tivating personality, a prodigious worker, he 
has many of the elements of a prophet—includ- 
ing a lucid, vivid, pungent style, which leaves 
no shadow upon his meaning. Yet, strangely 
enough, as much as I love peace, if he advocates 
universal brotherhood, he makes me want to 
fight. How stupid of me. With much that he 
has to say I fully agree—until he says it! He 
has all the dogmatism of Athanasius; he lacks 
only the dogma. But there is not the rub. It is 
not his dogmatism that makes my bristles rise, 
nor yet his dogma—though he is by genius a 
radical, and I by grace a conservative—since it 
is a part of my religion to grant every man his 
opinion, as I take mine, whether he has a right 
to it or not. No, it is a difference of tempera- 
ment, a thing far back, deep down, and hard 
to get at. How can one deal with a bias so 
subtle, so elusive, so ingrained in the fibre of 


114 Preaching in New York 


being? It puzzles me much. Anyway, I love 
my brilliant fellow-worker, admire his shining 
gifts, wish him every blessing, and 





March 18.—David Swing was right. Snakes 
crawl, birds fly, and rabbits run, but man talks 
himself forward. Having discussed a thing for 
half a century, he takes a cautious step in ad- 
vance, and then sits down and reopens the in- 
finite conversation. Take the matter of Church 
Unity, about which we are having a series of 
very able lectures at the Brick Church. All 
agree that a divided Church is wasteful, as well 
as stupid and ineffective; but the pace of a snail 
is swift beside our progress toward unity. In- 
deed, beyond the evil of overlapping, we do not 
know what we mean by Church Unity, much 
less how to bring it about. It makes one think 
of the saying of Rose Macaulay in What Not: 
“To organise religion, a man must have the 
talents of the Devil, or at least of an intelligent 
Civil Servant.” Anyway, the sons of darkness 
outwit the sons of light, and the cohesive power 
of greed outruns the coherence of Christian 
enterprise. Must the Church always be last, 
riding in an oxcart in a day of express trains? 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway’”’ 115 


March 20.—One of the finest feats of “or- 
ganised preaching” in New York is the Madi- 
son Avenue Presbyterian Church, under the 
leadership of Dr. Coffin. Standing on the bor- 
der-line between a fashionable apartment house 
section and a gray, polyglot slum, by a sagacious 
strategy it has brought the extremes of society 
together, as few churches have been able to do. 
It is a notable achievement, as much for its tact 
as for its vision, uniting personal piety and 
social ministry. Within all its many activities 
the genius of a great preacher is present to in- 
spire, to edify, to guide. A scholar, a teacher, 
a master of what Beecher called “executive 
Christian ideas,” he thinks like a statesman and 
preaches like a prophet. He convinces by his 
conviction, persuades by his earnestness, and 
ennobles by his compassion. But there is a 
something more in Dr. Coffin not to be defined, 
a union of adamant and star-light which makes 
his ministry a sacrament, and his character a 
consecration. 


March 22.—Found a gem in Brentano’s to- 
day, a plain, modest little book, rather drab in 
dress, the like of which has not been written 


116 Preaching in New York 


since the Middle Ages. It is called A Soldier’s 
Confidences With God, Spiritual Colloques of 
Giosue Borsi; and if it is not already a classic, 
it surely will be. A Diary of the Soul for the 
strength and comfort of the writer in the 
trenches, it was not meant for other eyes. He 
was no cloistered mystic, but a young man of 
the world, a poet, a scholar, an actor, a dra- 
matic critic, a commentator on Dante, a darling 
of the salons of Rome and Florence. His father 
taught him to hate the Church, but, like Augus- 
tine, he had a wonderful mother whose piety 
won him to faith. He was killed in action in 
1915, leading his men. So the Diary came to 
light, like a white star to guide the war-weary, 
bewildered souls of men. Its abject humility, 
its fearless searching of heart, its awed in- 
timacy of fellowship with God, and, not least, 
its gem-like beauty of style—bright, yet tender 
—make one think now of The Imitation, now 
of the Confessions of St. Augustine. No 
Protestant can write such a book—why is it so? 


March 23.—What a pity that Lent, instead 
of being a period of inner discipline, has become 
a relief from the dizzy social whirl; a time of 


““Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 117 


moral manicuring! Penitence? For a few de- 
vout souls, yes; but for the mass of church folk 
it is little more than a form. What fills one 
with deep disquiet about the Christianity of 
to-day is that it is so tame, so timid, so tepid, 
so sugary—a kind of glorified lollipop. No 
doubt we need to deal with the little gray sins 
that eat away our peace; but is there to be no 
prayer and fasting for social sins that make 
human life a hell? The ancient prophetic words 
flash like lightning: “Js not this the fast I 
have chosen? To loose the bonds of wicked- 
ness, to undo the bands of the yoke and to let 
the oppressed go free, and that ye break every 
yoke!’ To-day, as Jesus said long ago, we 
strain at gnats and swallow camels. The 
words of Forsyth are like swift sword-thrusts: 

“Our religion belongs too much to the re- 
ligion of indulgence, immunity. Piety takes 
the place of faith. Love becomes an affectional 
infinite instead of a moral absolute. We are 
melted without being moulded. We have tem- 
peramental piety instead of moral insight. 
Hence the public impotence of religion. It 
eases but does not cure the public case. It is 
for easy edification more than hard obedience. 


118 Preaching in New York 


We detach individual experience from the 
righteousness of God, with its almost automatic 
judgment on godless civilization. A church 
catholic is sought otherwise than by a church 
holy. We lose the vision of nations in solemn 
covenant round the great white throne. Weare 
fumbling at a social, national, international 
religion with the small key of a private piety 
and a provincial faith.” 


March 24.—The Maundy Thursday service 
to-night made me think of a remarkable Bible 
I saw in London, the legacy of James Smetham, 
the Methodist artist-preacher of the last cen- 
tury, whose letters are so rich. It was inter- 
leaved, and on the blank pages he had jotted 
down all manner of suggestive comments and 
meditations. Because, as an artist, he thought 
in pictures, his comment on a text often took 
the form of a thumb-nail-sketch. In the Gospel 
of St. John, the 18th Chapter, stands the story 
of the betrayal: ‘Judas Iscariot, who also be- 
trayed Him ’*" The comment of Smetham is a 
delightful little etching, half-an-inch square—a 
tiny baby, lying in a cradle, with rounded 
cheeks, and innocent eyes, and a mouth one 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 119 


would love to kiss. Underneath is written the 
name: Judas Iscariot! 


March 26.—As a lad, I knew nothing of 
Catholicism, save as a strange superstition 
called Popery, which I heard denounced as 
Antichrist, and every kind of ugly name. So, © 
reading in the paper about Cardinal Gibbons, I 
made bold to write him a long letter, telling him 
of my case and the awful things I had heard 
about his Church. In closing I asked him to 
name a book from which I might learn what the 
Church really taught, and something of its 
history. In due time came a letter, two pages 
long, written with his own hand, gentle and 
wise of spirit; and a few days later an auto- 
graphed copy of his little book, The Faith of 
Our Fathers. To-day I attended the service in 
his memory at the Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, 
drawn equally by veneration of a noble char- 
acter and gratitude to a great man who took 
time to answer the scrawling letter of a little 
boy eleven years old. Once more I felt the 
power of the Church, opening its arms alike to 
rich and poor, to the learned and the unlearned, 
flinging across their troubled lives the mantle 


120 ~=Preaching in New York 


of an august memory and an eternal hope— 
flooding the mortal scene with music and 
color and the romance of holiness! 


March 27.—Once again Easter Day builds its 
great Arch of Promise over the homes of our 
living and the graves of our dead. “If it were 
not so, I would have told you,” said Jesus; to 
which I love to add the words of St. Ignatius: 
“Those who have heard the word of Jesus can 
bear his silence.” He confirms faith without 
satisfying curiosity, but always he lets light 
through the Shadow. When he spoke of his 
own death He simply said, “I go to my Father.” 
No place is named, only a Presence. He 
thought in terms of life, and death was but a 
cloud-shadow floating over the human valley. 
Eternity is now, God is here, and death is but 
the shadow of life! O my soul, remember and 
rejoice! 

Friend, surely so, 

For this I know: 

That our faiths are foolish by falling below, 
Not coming above, what God will show. 

April 10.—Broadway is a parable of human 
life. Born amid the rocks of Spuyten Duyvil, 


it has an innocent, if rather ragged, childhood, 


‘““‘Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ | 


and it is ready for school by the time it reaches 
Columbia and Union Seminary—though one 
may doubt if it learns much theology. Leaving 
the University, it behaves very well at first; 
but by the time it arrives at Columbus Circle, 
its mind runs to automobiles, which is not a 
good omen. Alas, between Broadway Taber- 
nacle and the Flatiron Building, it is a gay and 
giddy-paced street, garish in manners if not in 
morals,—all lit up and flashy,—known as “the 
Street of Seven Sins,” though it is not as bad as 
it is painted. By the time it gets to Grace 
Church, it is a sober, middle-aged street, the 
elitter of the White Way having faded into the 
light of common day. At the City Hall it mixes 
in politics, but to no good purpose. Gradually 
it becomes the Street of the Dreadful Height, 
until it ends in a Grand Cafion, and thinks only 
of money, as if smitten with the avarice of age. 
Toward the end, even its churches are very 
rich; which makes one ponder the words of 
Jesus about the end of a “broad way.” 


April 15.—On a soft-spoken day in spring, 
when the sky is clear, with only bits of lacy 
clouds here and there, it is no good trying to 


122 Preaching in New York 


stay in and study; so I go a-rambling. New 
York is so vast,—like a human ocean,—that one 
may wander any whither: from Feather Bed 
Lane to the Bowery, from Hell Gate to Green- 
wich Village. On top of a bus I floated down 
the human river called Fifth Avenue, landing 
at Seventeenth Street, on my way to Irving 
Place, ‘the heart of the O. Henry country.” 
His house at No. 55 still stands, but he seems 
to be everywhere in New York, as the spirit 
of Dickens haunts London. Though not a New 
Yorker, no one was ever more penetrated by 
the genius and flavor of New York, its comedy, 
its tragedy, its endless surprise. 

Thence to the top of the Woolworth Tower, 
where, as from the peak of Matterhorn, one sees 
a maze of streets northward, through which 
Broadway and Fifth Avenue run like dual 
motifs of the city. From that dizzy pinnacle, 
what an incredible vista is unveiled—the hills 
of Jersey, the distances of Brooklyn, the 
harbor nearby, the blue tumbling sea, and Ellis 
Island, with thoughts of the inpouring tides of 
peoples of all lands, making one wonder what 
our America will be like fifty years hence. Be- 
low, the people on the streets look like a colony 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 123 


of ants crawling on the pavement; and Trinity 
and St. Paul’s are only toy churches, with tiny 
Spires, where men play with religion. Which 
thing is a parable, as if another philosophy of 
life had found vogue—an aggressive, gigantic, 
ambitious materialism; yet those tiny temples 
still bear witness to the things of the spirit. 
Once New York nestled under their shadow; 
now it towers above them. 

Taking lunch with the Old Banker at the 
India House was like escaping from New York 
to dine in the days of Charles Lamb; after 
which I strolled through Wall Street, on to the 
east and north, “where cross the crowded ways 
of life,” and found myself in the Bowery— 
which sorely needs a bath. The East Side is 
like the world of to-day, jammed together and 
slowly learning to live together, not without 
friction and fuss. By sunset I had strayed into 
Brooklyn, to the corner of Fulton and Cran- 
berry streets, where Walt Whitman set up and 
printed Leaves of Grass; and after a suffocat- 
ing journey in the Subway jam, I reached home, 
knowing of a truth that the line in the Pepys 
Diary is the greatest line in literature: “And 
so to bed,” 


124 Preaching in New York 


April 19.—Went with the throng to hear the 
President speak at the unveiling of the statue of 
Simon Bolivar in Central Park. It was a bril- 
liant day, and my heart behaved like a child 
when he appeared—tall, nobly formed, stately, 
benign, a little ill at ease, as if not yet used to 
the ways of his high office, and its loneliness, 
but with a haunting voice, and the kindest face 
I have ever looked into. He is a symbolic 
figure, with the vestiture upon him of the will 
and purpose of a nation; and we need not apolo- 
gise to any sentiment of equality for regarding 
him with reverence. When he is running for 
office, he is only a man; when elected, he is 
something more. The accolade of the national 
will makes him a priest of humanity in this 
land, where—please God—great ideals are 
being worked out. What the President does 
before the world he does for and through us, 
typifying the nation as no mere ruler could 
typify it. Huis character is our character, his 
work our work. God save the President! 


April 20.—Sir Philip Gibbs is one of the 
noblest and most lovable of living men, a bril- 
liant reporter, a great-hearted world-citizen. 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway” $25 


During the war he dipped his pen in the wells 
of agony, heroism, and pity and told us all he 
was allowed to tell of the holocaust of youth; 
and one felt, between the lines, that he was on 
the side of the Boys against “‘the old men” who 
sent them into the shambles. To-day he is as 
picturesque in painting a new world as he was 
in describing the ruin of the old. It is all so 
vivid, so near, just a jump away; but, alas, there 
is a yawning abyss, and our heavy-footed 
humanity is afraid to leap. Once such apoca- 
lyptic writing would have made our hearts beat 
high, but accumulated disillusion leaves us cold. 
Such men think in pictures, not in processes. 
What we need now are great engineers, patient 
bridge-builders, wise path-finders, if we are to 
cross or go around the abyss of impotence and 
despair that yawns at our feet. If less impres- 
sive as an interpreter than as a reporter, Sir 
Philip Gibbs does help to keep our souls alive 
by his vision and his pity—his trust in God and 
his faith in youth—and his character is worth 
more than a fleet of ships. 


April 24.—At lunch to-day some one told 
how Beecher answered the following letter :— 


126 Preaching in New York 


“Dear Sir: I journeyed over from my New 
York hotel yesterday to hear you preach, ex- 
pecting, of course, to hear an exposition of the 
Gospel of Christ. Instead, I heard a political 
harangue, with no reason or cohesion in it. 
You made an ass of yourself.” To which the 
great preacher replied: “My dear Sir: Iam 
sorry you should have taken so long a journey 
to hear Christ preached, and then heard what 
you are polite enough to call a ‘political ha- 
rangue!’ J am sorry, too, that you think I 
made an ass of myself. I have but one con- 
solation; that you did not make an ass of your- 
self: the Lord did that.” As Samuel Butler 
said long ago, some people are “equally horrified 
at hearing the Christian religion doubted, or at 
seeing it practiced;” content to worship Christ 
on Sunday and follow Machiavelli on week 
days. They do not see that a sermon in defence 
of the present order of things is as much ‘“‘po- 
litical preaching” as a sermon in criticism of it! 


May 5.—Picked up a bargain in a second- 
hand book store, Women and Theatres, by Olive 
Logan, (New York: Carleton, 1869) all for 
fifteen cents! Two chapters interested me— — 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 127 


“About the Leg Business” and “About Nudity 
in Theatres’—showing to what extent our 
stage was given up to the worship of Lubricity 
in the decade following the Civil War. The 
author tells of a certain popular actress who, 
“stripped as naked as she dare, trots down to 
the footlights, giggles, winks at the audience, 
and rattles off some stupid attempts at wit;” 
and yet she made more money than “the poetic 
Edwin Booth, infinitely more than the intellec- 
tual E. L. Davenport.” Of the entire list of 
New York theatres, only Booth’s was clear of 
the charge of giving “nude exhibitions;” as a 
critic of the times put it, “legs are lyrics and 
beauty is only skin deep.” At one time, in 
1868, only two theatres in the city were offering 
legitimate drama. One manager, after losing 
money on a classic play, “rubbed his dry old 
hands together” and said, “T’ll put a woman on 
my stage without a rag on her.” It is not ex- 
actly pretty reading, but it does make one cheer- 
ful about the theatre of to-day, which we are 
told is headed for Hades at lightning speed. 
Things are bad enough, but not as bad as they 
were in the “good old days”—thank goodness! 


128 Preaching in New York 


May 14.—What is the great American sin? 
Extravagance?) Vice? Graft? Nos it 4s a 
kind of half-humorous, good-natured indiffer- 
ence,—a lack of ‘concentrated indignation,’ as 
an English friend described it,—which allows 
extravagance and vice to flourish. Trace most 
of our ills to their source, and it is found that 
they exist by virtue of an easy-going, fatalistic 
indifference which dislikes to have its comfort 
disturbed. For years a tide of immigration has 
poured in upon us, threatening to inundate our 
institutions ; but America did not care—lacking 
public-mindedness. Lawlessness runs rife for 
the same reason, in this city of cliff-dwellers 
and cavemen. The most shameless greed, the 
most sickening industrial atrocities, the most 
appalling public scandals are exposed; but a 
half-cynical and wholly indifferent public passes 
them by with hardly a shrug of the shoulders; 
and they are lost in the medley of events. This 
is the great American sin, inviting the thunder 
and lightning of the wrath of God. 


May 23.—Standing on the pier at Hoboken 
to-day, in the presence of the remains of five 
thousand boys brought back from the fields of 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 129 


France—each casket draped with a flag, until 
the whole scene looked like one vast Flag of 
the Dead—the President said with a sob in his 
voice: “It must not be again. We shall not 
forget.” If those words, so apt and fitly 
spoken, express anything more than a vague 
wish—pious, sentimental, negative—what are 
we going to do about it? What can we do, sunk 
in an awful apathy, born of disillusionment and 
dismay, with red revolution on one side and 
black reaction on the other? War was simple 
and exciting; peace is complex and dull. Yet, 
if our devout prayers are to be answered, we 
must somehow organize to answer them, since 
God will not do for us what it is our duty to do. 

At least we can renew our faith at the Altar 
of Memory, recalling Hankey, Chapin, Seeger, 
Brooke, Sorley, Kilmer—a rosary of genius— 
who kept “rendezvous with death,” and, dying, 
left one shining phrase, “Carry On,” which 
should be the first command of the living! 
They were not cynics. They did not fear, or 
falter, or fail—how can we bow to the foul mud | 
gods of greed and hate in the presence of such 
a cloud of witnesses! By their faith we must 


130 Preaching in New York 


win the victories of Peace, as they won the 
victories of War. 


June 10.—Have been out in Jowa—what a 
relief after the din and rush and hurly-burly of 
New York! One gets tired of noises, tired of 
foreign tongues, tired of the panorama of 
strange faces, tired of a kaleidoscopic cosmo- 
politanism. It was a joy to escape from the 
crowded confusion into the wide spaces where 
there is room to breathe, room to think, and 
where, by the mercy of God, 

Silence like a poultice came 

To heal the blows of sound. 
Also, it is good to get away, betimes, from the 
New York point. of view, which so easily sees 
things all awry. Iowa thinks as little of New 
York as New York thinks of Iowa; they are 
two worlds, as unlike as two planets. Both are 
provincial, but in different ways, and one is 
needed to off-set the other. To neurotic city 
eyes Main Street may seem drab and dismal, 
but how little they know of its neighborliness, 
its unveneered humanity. Iowa is at the heart 
of America, and if the Lord will let me stop 
there a while before I go hence, I shall loiter as 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway’”’ 131 


long as I can, until “a sweeping Garment, vast 
and white,” shall brush me off the earth. 


June 19.—There is an O. Henry story in 
which a Westerner came to New York and well 
nigh died of lonesomeness. He hungered for 
conversation, but no one had time to talk. Fin- 
ally, he compelled the keeper of a cafe, at the 
point of a revolver, to enlarge upon his curt 
comment on the weather, and talk at some 
length about the baby, about the new piano, 
about all manner of heartening topics. In Lon- 
don the tale would be believable; but not in New 
York! At least not in summer time, when folk 
from the South and West, and everywhere— 
buyers, tourists, gad-abouts, and all sorts— 
invade the city. To Southerners this swelter- 
ing, sizzling town is a summer resort, and their 
leisurely ways, their courtesy, their infinite talk 
make it seem like an over-grown village. If 
you speak to a man these days, in the softest 
voice he will tell you his autobiography, all 
about the “doings” down south, and an 
elaborate yarn besides. 

Meantime, the papers say “New York is 
empty!’ It may be for those whose homes are 


132 Preaching in New York 


boarded up in May, not to be opened till Novem- 
ber, while, in far off shady woods, beside placid 
lakes or blue seas, they escape the conscription 
of daily toil—gayly unmindful of the multitudes 
who stifle in the brazen furnace of interminable 
streets. How little New Yorkers know of New 
York! It is in fact a series of villages held 
together by a loose bond; the rich dwell in one, 
the poor in another, knowing next to nothing 
of each other. Life is specialized. We run in 
a rut, go ina set, forgetting the human universe 
about us. 


June 20.—Went to the East Side, to offer a 
gentle prayer over a little child run over and 
killed by a car. Up four flights of stairs, in 
narrow halls lit by dim gas-jets, over floors 
creaky and uneven, I reached the tenement 
“home,’’ where I witnessed a heart-breaking 
scene. Half-a-hundred people had gathered in 
the rooms and halls, a testimony to the kindli- 
ness and neighborliness of the poor. After 
the service, as the little body was carried out, 
the children who had been playing in the street 
assembled, their bright, pretty faces bestreaked 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway’”’ ac 


with dirt, making a picture, as they stood in 
silence. 

For hours I wandered along the dingy streets, 
littered with rubbish, where people are so 
crowded that life treads on life, and solitude 
must be unknown. The sidewalks swarmed 
with children; the air rang with their shouts or 
curses, as they darted to and fro amid the 
rumble of the wheels, playing games. To one 
watching the scene, it has a kind of repulsive 
picturesqueness; but to be in it, with no hope 
of a better lot, would make the best people of 
the city anarchists within a week. Yet it is 
accepted with patient fatalism by people whose 
dwelling-places are more like lairs and dens 
than homes. Only the joy of the children re- 
deemed its drabness from utter desolation. 

Rambling on into the Jewish quarter, I found 
the sidewalks thronged with peddlers and pur- 
chasers, and everybody trafficking eagerly. 
There were little girls of Madonna-like beauty, 
with oval faces and olive tints, and clear, dark 
eyes, relucent as evening pools; and on boxes 
and in doorways, old men with long beards of 
jetty black or silvery gray, and the noble pro- 
files of their race. Among such as these, I 


134 Preaching in New York 


remembered, Jesus walked, and from among 
them He chose his disciples and friends. As I 
walked homeward in the falling daylight, the 
scene was touched by the gentleness of evening, 
blurring its harsh realities with beauty—like 
the mercy of God softening the brutality of 
man. 


July 1.—Coney Island in July! It is the in- 
flamed appendix of ‘“Noiseville-on-the-Hud- 
son,’ where human beings battered by the 
whirligig of life in New York, enjoy assault 
and battery by super-noises, extra-loud, long, 
and shrill. Its very architecture yells, its pillars 
barber poles, its decorations gilded bas-reliefs 
like the tops of the cages in the circus. What 
is a shout on Broadway is a shriek at Coney. 
Every auto keeps its klaxon going, and not a 
peanut-roaster but has a whistle that never 
stops. Jazz goes on fourteen hours a day, 
barkers chant, scream and roar their wares, and 
even toy balloons explode with the wail of a 
dying pig, while the brass band plays in Bedlam. 

It is glorious! After a “hot dog” sandwich 
and a Babylonian brick of ice-cream, we go up 
on the Ferris wheel, down the long-legged 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway’’ 135 


trestles on the roller-coaster, and round and 
round on the Merry-go-round, to the grinding 
rhythm of an artificial xylophone. In the park 
lovers loll and “spoon.” Betimes, we hire a suit 
at the Jew-nicipal bath-house, and splash up 
and down in the sea, or toss rings for Kewpie 
dolls, or shoot at leaping tin rabbits, and eat 
pop-corn. Or, dizzy by thrill on thrill, we just 
watch the human moving picture show, till eve- 
ning falls and the electric lights, looped and 
festooned above us, add glitter to our glee. 
Then, having climbed the Swiss Alps, ‘“‘with 
a real water-fall,”’ and looked into a dreadful 
opium den, ‘a replica of one on the Barbara 
coast,’ we fight, shove, crowd our way into 
airless cars for home, packed like sardines— 
jammed, jolted, happy! Joy, joy, it is the life! 


July 4.—In spite of the corrosive spirit of the 
hour, and the cataleptic muscular contractions 
of nations, each trying to huddle within itself, 
the great words of Edmund Burke still tell the 
truth, like a transcription from the _ hiero- 
glyphics of God. In his Reflections on the 
French Revolution, he wrote: 

“Society is indeed a contract. It is a part- 


136 ~=6 Preaching in New York 


nership in all science; a partnership in all art; 
a partnership in all virtue, and in all perfection. 
As the ends of such a partnership cannot be 
obtained in many generations, it becomes a 
partnership not only between those who are liv- 
ing, but between those who are dead, and those 
who are to be born. Each contract of each 
particular state is but a clause in the great 
primeval contract of eternal society, linking the 
lower with the higher natures, connecting the 
visible with the invisible world, according to a 
fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath 
which holds all physical and all moral natures, 
each in their appointed place.” 


July 8.—At 110th Street and Amsterdam 
Avenue, not far from the gates of Columbia 
University, stands the Old Gospel Tent, where 
revival services are held. Nowhere is real 
evangelism more needed than in New York, but, 
alas, the men of the Old Gospel Tent think it 
more important to denounce Darwin and defy 
the University—challenging its Professors to 
debate, describing them as “baboon boosters,” 
“monkey-lovers,” and the like. What a spec- 
tacle, a narrow, pietistic religion camped at the 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 139 


gates of a great University! To such a depth 
has Christian evangelism fallen that it must 
play at clap-trap, belittling philosophy and 
ridiculing science. Truly Erasmus was right: 
“By identifying the new learning with heresy 
you make orthodoxy synonymous with ignor- 
ance!’ How one longs for the tender, human 
appeal of Gypsy Smith, the spiritual common 
sense of Moody, or the winsomeness of George 
Truett. 


July 10.—When there is a parade on Fifth 
Avenue, which is always the centre of the stage, 
—whether it be the Circus and the elephants, or 
the “Old Soaks” protesting against Prohibition 
on the Fourth of July—New York is like a 
village. People otherwise aloof are friendly, 
gossipy, and charming. To-day, by contrast, 
the Christian Endeavorers marched to the 
music of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” One 
banner they carried arrested attention: “A 
Warless World by 1923!” All wished it might 
be so, but many thought it too brave a prophecy. 
But I remember a similar slogan carried in 
1911: “A Saloonless Nation by 1921;” and it 
came true, with time to spare. Who shall say 


138 Preaching in New York 


that the principle of world peace shall not 
swiftly prevail, since the pressure of grim facts 
is proving, by a Divine pragmatism, that war 
is suicide! The Church is not dead, least of all 
when it marches and works in unity. 


July 17.—Dr. Albert Parker Fitch, the sum- 
mer supply at the Brick Church, moves me as 
few other living preachers, as if he had the key 
to a secret door in my nature. A keen, critical 
modern intellect, alive to the issues and agita- 
tions of our day—its social passion, its scientific 
quest—he is also an ancientist in his faith. He 
strikes a chord hardly heard since the Middle 
Ages, which makes our new pragmatisms and 
old naturalisms seem petty and superficial; a 
note aloof and haunting, evoking a spell tender 
and terrible, as old as the world and as mys- 
terious as the wind in the trees. Aye, he knows 
that 

Our destiny, our being’s heart and home, 

Is with infinitude, and only there; 
and that our dream of social justice will end in 
defeat, unless a profounder Life of the Spirit 
upholds it, transfigures it, and gives it consecra- 
tion. To-day I rode fifty miles to hear him 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 139 


preach, and the prayer alone was worth the 
journey. It was meat and medicine to my soul. 
Nay, more; something deep in me, half-uttered 
and half-dumb, found voice in its winged 
words. After all, preaching, if it strikes “the 
depth beyond the bottom,” has no rival in the 
human heart. 


July 21.—From my study on Riverside Drive 
I look down upon the majestic, broad-breasted 
Hudson as it nears the sea which is its eternity. 
Its moods are as many as my own, varying 
with the hours: now lucid and revealing, now 
overhung by a soft haze of dreamy meditation, 
now swept by drifting mist, like a blue dust of 
rain. It has become almost personal in its 
friendliness, and I seem to feel its bafflement 
when the inflowing tide pushes its waters up- 
stream, like the pressure of the Eternal Will 
thwarting my impulsive spirit. None the less, 
it is calm, having won by depth what all the 
world is seeking—peace! 

How God must love beauty. Every evening 
I watch the Divine Artist painting a new sun- 
set over the New Jersey hills, and marvel at 
his masterpieces. Last night the whole sky was 


140 Preaching in New York 


aglow with gorgeous colors shining through 
long bars of clouds—awe-inspiring in its loveli- 
ness. First a mass of molten splendor,—like 
Dante’s great rose of gold,—with a founda- 
tion of dark vapor. Gradually the gold 
changed to delicate, tender green, then to pale 
lavender, deepening into soft purple as night 
came down—like a shade slowly drawn over a 
latticed window in the City of God. 


September 11.—The birthday of O. Henry! 
It ought to be honored all over New York, in 
whose teeming, whirling, variegated life he saw 
a perpetual Arabian Nights entertainment. 
He was steeped in it, intoxicated by it. From 
the lower East Side, where, in August, “kids 
on fire-escapes with their tongues out try to 
get a bit of fresh air that hasn’t been fried on 
both sides,” to the bright lights of the Great 
White Way “calling moths from miles, from 
leagues, to come in and attend the singeing 
school,” he knew the wonderland of New York. 
To him it was “the Great Big City of Razzle 
Dazzle,” and his stories, if taken together, are 
its best biography. He seems to have been 
most at home in lower New York, in Green- 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 141 


wich Village, Gramercy Park, the Bowery, 
and along Broadway. Only once, it is said, did 
he venture as far up town as Seventy-second 
Street and Riverside, and then he asked with 
an injured air if he had “not passed Peakshill!” 
It was New York as a laboratory of human 
nature that held his insight and interest, and in 
its medley of comedy and tragedy he was happy, 
learning the while how to 


Turn to a woman a woman’s 
Heart, and a child’s to a child. 


September 18.—By the kindness of a British 
friend I have received one of the most remark- 
able books of theology in recent years, The 
W orld’s Redemption, by E. C. Rolt—a book of 
living insight into the deepest mystery. It is 
an unfinished, unpolished book, and was little 
noticed when it appeared; the work of a dying 
man writing away from his library—its pierc- 
ing insight due, perhaps, to the ministry of pain 
and the near presence of death—yet, while not 
invulnerable to criticism, revealing more 
authentic theological genius than any book I 
remember. It deals with the wonder of the love 
of God in a manner unique and profound, 


142 Preaching in New York 


almost penetrating the mystery into which the 
writer was so soon to pass—lingering at the 
portal while he wrote. 


September 28.—The Preaching of To-mor- 
row! It was the theme of one of the most 
thrilling addresses I have ever heard, by Dr. 
Johnston Ross, at the opening of Union Sem- 
inary to-day. Having spent his year of rest 
in the Orient, along the Christian frontier, he 
returned to tell us what preaching must be 
against that background. The ultimate end of 
religion, he said, is the production of “a dis- 
position of respectful, ministrant good will,” 
which will make use of science for the more 
skillful service of humanity. The address was 
an example of the kind of preaching it proph- 
esied. No one will ever forget its vividness, its 
flash and play of insight, humor and pathos, 
and its revelation of personality by which truth 
is made real and winsome—which remains the 
secret of preaching to-day, as it will be to- 
morrow. Somehow, with his far-sweeping 
sympathy, his catholic faith, his soft sure in- 
sight, his brooding beauty of phrase, and an 
“ineffable remainder” which eludes words, Dr. 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 143 


Ross finds me at deeper levels than almost any 
preacher among us. 


September 30.—James Bryce, Henry van 
Dyke, and Lyman Abbott sitting together at a 
luncheon given by the American-Armenian So- 
ciety—we shall hardly see that picture again. 
Three tiny men physically, yet what influence 
and power they have in church and state and 
letters. Now they are faring toward sunset, 
and one feels about them what Carlyle felt in 
Chalmers, a serenity as of “the oncoming eve- 
ning and the star-crowned night!” 

A chat with Dr. Abbott gave me opportunity 
to ask him some questions I had long wanted 
to ask him. He thought his Theology of an 
Evolutionist had been his most influential book, 
but he had put more of himself into his Life 
and Letters of Paul. If he were to rewrite his 
commentaries, he said, he would make no special 
change in John and Romans, but would modify 
some things in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and the 
Acts. His rules of work are, first, never to do 
anything himself which he can get any one else 
to do; and second, to take his rest before his 
work, not as a restorative after it. 


144 Preaching in New York 


As Lord Bryce spoke of the Armenian 
horrors, his eyes filled with a mist of tears, and 
his voice trembled on the edge of a sob, remem- 
bering the inconceivable cruelties of the slow, 
ghastly crucifixion of a nation—a crime un- 
paralleled in modern history, a red blot alike 
on Christianity and civilisation! 


October 8.—During the last seven years I 
have heard much preaching, in London and in 
New York, and it has given me a new under- 
standing of the man at both ends of the sermon. 
Many kinds of preaching I have heard—good, 
bad, thrilling, ineffective; not much preaching 
in the older and more stately style, with pol- 
ished phrases and elaborate homiletics; some 
pretty, perfumed preaching, as hard to endure 
as slangy, sloppy preaching; much virile, force- 
ful, interesting preaching, topical, journalistic, 
often striking, and at times picturesque; very 

y little expository preaching, as in the days of 
Maclaren and Dale; too much catch-penny 
preaching, taking up topics of the day in a 
cheap, sensational fashion; a great deal of 
wholesome, inspiring, edifying preaching, good 
to hear and wise to heed; and now and then 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway”’ 145 


the haunting notes of a New Preaching, simple, 
vivid, direct, human, challenging. 

The New Preacher is a man of culture to his 
finger-tips, alive to the ideas and issues of his 
age, aware of all that goes on in science, let- 
ters, and life, whether in the drawing-room of 
the human heart or in the basement—but he 
wears his learning lightly. Abjuring the old 
vocabulary of theology—an unknown tongue 
in a day of spiritual illiteracy—he uses the 
speech of his day in a style familiar, colloquial, 
conversational, with no filigree oratory. If he 
approaches religion from the humanitarian and 
ethical side, it is a stroke of strategy and tact, 
taking men as he finds them, welcoming such 
faith as they have as a point of contact. He is 
not dismayed when a bright, jazz-minded lad 
says, with a superior air, speaking of Heaven 
and Hell: ‘On that line there’s nothin’ doin’.” 
He knows how to go forth on the hills, and 
bring home wild asses with bridles on their 
necks, 

Not yet has the New Preacher become an 
evangelist, as he must be if his Social Gospel 
is to have individual appeal. But he knows 
his age, lives in it, loves it, and he is learning 


146 Preaching in New York 


to play the ancient, eternal music on the strange 
key-board of the modern mind—knowing that 
behind its airy cleverness there hides the old 
wistful need of God, without whom the human 
theorem has no answer. He sees that Jesus 
saw straight and knew what he was talking 
about, and until men make trial of His truth 
they will flounder in a bog—like a car in the 
ditch. Against war, racial rancor, industrial 
brutality, and the new sensualism he aims his 
darts, hating hokum, hocus-pocus, and all un- 
reality, the while he laughs at sectarianism. 

In England we have Studdert-Kennedy, a 
prince of New Preachers—who learned the 
need and knack of it amid the fire-rains of 
War—with Orchard, Norwood, Sheppard, 
Maude Royden, Berry, Sykes, and others next 
of kin. In America we hear such voices as 
Fosdick, Hough, Gilkey, Sockman, Luccock, 
Sperry, Roberts, to name no others. These, 
and others of like kind, bespeak a New Pulpit, 
alike in technique and teaching, in which a real- 
ism of insight is united with a richness of sym- 
pathy, the old values with the new vision—an 
emancipated intellect joined with the eternal 
orthodoxy of the heart—prophesying the rule 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 147 


of the Law of Love in the lives of men and its 
reign in a new social order. 


October 10.—Spent a glorious hour in the 
studio of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor, hidden 
away in a woodland near Stamford. The 
Master was not at home, but his tools were 
there, and the miniatures of his masterpieces, 
among them a tiny model of the noble face of 
Lincoln now in the Capitol at Washington—a 
face to fortify by its firmness and bless by its 
gentleness. There, too, was his Roosevelt, in- 
stinct with energy and incandescent vitality, 
uniting an effervescent temperament with a 
vivid simplicity of thought and a swift sagacity 
of action. What a personality! Only genius 
could have caught and fixed its reflection in the 
eternal repose of granite. The Newark War 
Memorial is unfinished, but slowly taking shape, 
showing in outline the pageant of American 
history. Outside the studio the autumn woods 
were as full of color as a painter’s shop, and 
the falling leaves made a cloth of gold. 


October 14.—The Methodists are a wonder- 
ful folk. Alike on the far frontier, where the 


148 Preaching in New York 


“circuit-rider” carries a Bible in one side of the 
saddle-bags, and a hymn-book in the other, or 
in the human wilderness of New York, they 
never falter nor fail. Down on John Street, 
“the Mother Church of American Methodism” 
has held an every-day-in-the-year noon-day 
service for more than thirty years. Inthe glare 
of the Great White Way, “ninety-nine steps 
from Broadway,” they have a Union Church 
Social Centre where human service is a fine art, 
whether it be teaching the Bible, or getting a 
job for a toe-dancer, or helping a chorus-girl 
over a hard place. If one method does not 
work, they try another, as Wesley did long ago. 
Manhattan Island will soon be missionary ter- 
ritory for Protestant churches, but the Method- 
ists will never give up, never be defeated. 


October 25.—Have been showing an English 
friend the sights of New York, and it was as 
good as a story-book. He had never seen the 
city before, and if I stretched matters a little, 
the Lord will surely forgive—I simply had to 
make New York better than London. Of 
course, it is no use dragging all the skeletons 
from the closet, so I avoided certain sections 


“Bagdad-on-the-Subway” 149 


of town. He was a good sport, pretending to 
accept my version of facts; but when I said that 
the Pennsylvania Station takes the shine off 
Buckingham Palace, he had his doubts. Up 
Riverside Drive to Grant’s tomb, through the 
University and Union Seminary, and lunch at 
the Russian Inn, where some artist has told 
fairy-stories in a riot of color. Down town to 
Trinity, St. Paul’s, and Wall Street, and tea 
at a famous French café in Greenwich Village. 
Washington Square, the O. Henry Country, 
and Gramercy Park, and dinner at the Armen- 
ian Restaurant. As we parted at the Prince 
George Hotel, he said with a twinkle in his 
eye: “To-morrow you must let me see the 
American quarter!’ The rogue! With other 
beings made in the image of God I rode home 
in a stuffy car, thinking Subway thoughts. 


November 1.—As the Washington Confer- 
ence draws near, all kinds of thoughts, hopes, 
and misgivings mingle in my heart. Memories 
throng upon me, especially that day in 1917 
when I took part in the burial of five hundred 
and twenty-seven boys. When I close my eyes, 
the scene comes back; the long rows of silent 


150 Preaching in New York 


figures, each with a cloth thrown over it. Of 
course, we are bidden not to be sentimental but 
very “practical”; yet I feel that the boys who 
gave their bodies to the shells—fathers of 
dream-children, never now to be born—ought 
to have something to say at the Conference. 
If those millions could pass in procession before 
our imagination, surely the hesitations of 
diplomacy and the fanaticisms of nationality 
would be forgotten! 

Facts are the presence of God—physical 
facts, economic facts, no less than moral facts 
—and by no stretch of words can the facts of 
the world to-day be called practical. They sug- 
gest either iniquity or imbecility, or both. To- 
day, as is always true in the long last, even 
financial facts confirm the moral demands, and 
that is the hope that something may be done. 
After all, it may be the mission of economic 
determinism to teach righteousness, as it is the 
function of religion to reveal meanings and 
values—as the seers of old read the will of God 
for their times in the courses of history and 
the exegesis of events. 

Happily the sky is less cloudy, the public 
mind less torn by party rancor and personal 


‘“Bagdad-on-the-Subway” Wort 


venom; and the whisper of grief is subdued 
from a sob to a sigh. Perhaps, by the mercy 
of God, we may take one timid step, if no more, 
toward that far off, long dreamed of goal of 
a frontierless and unfortified world, ruled by 
moral intelligence and creative good will. But 
the facts will not let us hope too much. The 
apathy is deadening, the inertia appalling; 
humanity learns so slowly and forgets too 
quickly, and the flood of years sweeps the past 
away. 


“To build and build and build on running 
sand 
How terrible it must be to be God!” 





November 6.—If I had my way, there would 
be no Minister at the Church of the Divine 
Paternity, but only the great Organ, with its 
myriad keys, tones, and echoes, played by the 
gentle-hearted, spiritually-minded Artist who 
for twenty-three years has made his instrument 
an Altar. Such music is both priest and 
prophet to me, uttering those wistful yearnings 
which well up in every human heart, but which 
no tongue can speak, and whispering those 


152 Preaching in New York 


white truths mortal words discolor. When I 
hear it I begin to see the hint of a meaning in 
the turbid ebb and flow of human misery about 
me, albeit only a glimpse, only the vague shape 
of a reason that floats into my heart, and melts 
as quickly away. But in rare moments, by the 
mercy of God, I feel a ground swell of pro- 
phetic rhythm—an undertone of all-sustaining 
melody—running through our tangled mortal 
life, prophesying a fair, far time when sorrow 
and sin shall cease, and the soul of man shall 
be happy and free—learning in love the truth 
it has lost in hate. And sometimes, as he plays, 
life drops its veil, the tumult of time is hushed, 
and those who have vanished seem near—Eter- 
nity murmurs on all my horizons, and the noise- 
less knocking of a Presence is at my Gate. 


Papers 
A Tea With Tagore 


“What is wrong with the world? Why is it 
so upset and out of joint? What truth have 
we missed that we cannot set it right, cannot 
find a way out of the bog into which it has 
fallen? What can the great, deep mind of the 
Fast tell us for the healing of humanity?” 

Questions such as these were in my mind as 
I went to a meeting with Rabindranath Tagore, 
the Hindu poet and seer, kindly arranged for 
me by a young man of India whom I had 
learned to know and love in London. There 
came back the scene from The Talisman, by 
Sir Walter Scott, telling how, a truce having 
been called, Richard and Saladin met and a 
test of skill was proposed. The big brawny 
man of the West with one blow cut a bar of 
iron in two, and the man from the East was 


amazed. Then Saladin, in his turn, drew a 
153 


154 Preaching in New York 


keen scimitar and in an instant, as with the 
twist of the wrist, laid open a pillow of down. 
King Richard was amazed at his dexterity. It 
was a parable of the East and the West, in their 
qualities of mind, and I wondered if they could 
ever really understand each other. 

Kipling said no. East is East, he said, and 
West is West, and never the twain shall meet. 
But they have been meeting for ages. The 
Bible we read is a book of the East, and he 
whom we follow as the Master of Life wore a 
turban and a tunic. Time out of mind the 
thought of the East has been fertilising the 
West, opening seeds of faith and beauty. The 
Light of Asia, even when seen through the 
stained glass of poetry, warms us strangely— 
touching our prosaic life with the glow of that 
eternal mysticism out of which the great re- 
ligions were born. A common afflatus pervades — 
the epigrams of Goethe, the oriental poetry of © 
Hugo, the music of Verdi, and the essays of 
Emerson—the wandering brotherhood of the 
winds having brought a rich pollen from afar. 

It was in 1866 that Keshub Sen gave his 
great lecture, Jesus Christ, Europe and Asia; 
and three years later the same voice was heard 


A Tea with Tagore 155 


in the question, “India Asks Who Is Christ?” 
The answer was that he is a prophet of the 
East, and that the men of the East may, per- 
haps, know and understand him better than we 
who live in the West. Four years later came 
that golden book, unique in our annals for its 
spiritual insight and beauty, The Oriental 
Christ, by Mazoomdar, afterwards the dear 
friend of David Swing, who described him as 
“a soul perfumed by the winds and flowers of 
heavenly places, a shadow of the early Chris- 
tians who followed Jesus with shouts and palm 
branches.” Yes, Kipling was wrong; no one 
can compute the debt which the men of the 
West owe to the men of the East. 

It was in the Algonquin Hotel, and the room 
in which I was received had a touch of eastern 
light and color, as if the poet had brought a 
bit of India to America. Standing beside the 
tea-table, he greeted me with a gentle, stately 
simplicity of courtesy, friendly without being 
too formal, and we began talking of his various 
visits to our country—the first when his son 
was a student at the University of Illinois, the 
second when he came in the interest of his 
school, this being the third. As he talked his 


156 Preaching in New York 


exquisitely soft voice was like music, and the 
impression of a great spiritual personality made 
an atmosphere in which one thought only of 
the highest things. His oriental robes, his 
dome-like forehead, his long iron-gray hair and 
beard, his beautiful dark eyes, made a picture of 
singular winsomeness, as if some figure had 
stepped out of the pages of the Bible. 

As he talked on, speaking with the English 
accent—beginning a sentence in the treble key 
and sliding down—I remembered how when 
Yeats sought to find some one with whom to 
compare Tagore, he went back to Thomas 
a-Kempis. But a-Kempis was obsessed by the 
thought of sin, and Tagore seems to have as 
little thought of sin as a child. Say, rather, 
that he is a kind of blend of Walt Whitman 
and Francis of Assisi—a soul to whom the law 
and life of the world is love, comradeship, joy. 
My mind went back to my first reading of his 
poetry, in Song Offerings, and the enchant- 
ment of it—like floating, far off music, with 
a wistful elusive sadness, yet with touches to 
remind one of the Song of Songs, its imagery 
so tenuous at times, like filmy smoke-tapestry— 
and how, later, I had a happy argument with 


A Tea with Tagore 157 


Alfred Noyes as to whether it is poetry at all 
or not. From these memories I was called 
sharply back by what he was saying about 
America: 

“It is indeed strange,” he said. “When I 
walk the streets of your brilliant city, people 
look at me as if I were a man of another planet. 
I am acomic figure. They smile at me, curi- 
ously. What can it mean?” 

“No, our people are not unfriendly,’ I 
hastened to assure him. “Your oriental dress is 
odd and unfamiliar, and they look at you with 
the curiosity of provincials. They do not mean 
to be unkind. In London men of the East are 
often seen, but in New York it is not so. Your 
people do not come often enough.” 

“But you will not let them come; you shut 
them out as despised Asiatics,” he replied. 
“They are ‘the scum of the earth’ to you, ap- 
parently. America does not want us. Our 
ancient culture, our old and sweet customs mean 
nothing to it. Our ways are wrong because 
they are different. America lacks respect for 
unlikeness, for otherness. Its democracy seeks 
to make all men alike, to run them into one 
mould, to rob them or shame them out of their 


158 Preaching in New York 


picturesqueness of diversity. Americanization 
seems to mean that when all accept a certain 
formula it is enough; but old racial traits and 
cultural characteristics cannot be ironed out of 
humanity. Nor should they be. It is not a 
melting-pot that is needed, but a flower-garden, 
where each race may bloom and add its beauty 
to the commonwealth.” 

“Tt is only too true,” I admitted, for he had 
put his finger upon the absurdity of regimented 
democracy which seeks equality at the expense 
of liberty. “But America is young, as the lives 
of people go, and we have much to learn. Our 
faults are the faults of youth, and may be over- 
come. To go from America to England, for 
example, is like leaving a foot-ball team to 
attend a faculty meeting. America needs India, 
and, if I may say so, perhaps India needs 
America.” 

‘Ah, it is well said,” he agreed, emphasizing 
his approval with a graceful bow of the head; 
“it is good to hear you say it. So few men 
of the West think that India has anything to 
give to the world—forgetting our high philoso- 
phy and our rich literature and our treasure of 
song. They come to us for what they can get, 


A Tea with Tagore 159 


not for what we can give—seeking to exploit 
us, not to understand us. They are not com- 
rades, but conquerors. They think we are 
inferior to them because we are unlike them: 
Our culture is ignored in their universities— 
they do not know us, lacking the sympathetic 
insight needed to see a different point of view.” 

There was a tone of pathos in his voice, the 
echo of a great heartbreak at thought of the 
chaos of the world and the tragedy of India. 
It was a sadness hard to know from despair, 
deepened, I felt, by his glimpse of our metallic, 
touch-the-button civilisation in the West, and 
the tide of materialism and narrow national- 
ism now flowing. Like all the finer minds of 
the world, he is bereaved; and I reflected that 
he spoke as a poet commanding the largest 
audiences that any poet ever won. From end 
to end of India his songs are sung, especially his 
songs breathing a passionate love of his ancient 
motherland. 

“What is wrong with the world that we mis- 
understand each other so sadly? Why have we 
gotten so snarled and twisted and seem to see 
no way out? After all, we are brothers made to 
share the large innocence of nature and the 


160 Preaching in New York 


unfailing love of God. Why have we gone so 
far astray?” I asked, thinking to lead up to 
other matters that I had in mind. 

“The world does not know the truth,” he 
said simply. “It has no common idea about 
which its life may unite and cohere. It has for- 
gotten, if it ever discovered, that down below 
race, rank, religion there is a fundamental 
humanity—man as man—which is universal 
and everywhere the same. I ama man of India 
as to my origin, training, and outlook; but I 
am something else—I am a human being, a man 
of humanity. I have learned that, though our 
tongues are different and our habits are dis- 
similar, at bottom our hearts are one. The 
clouds, generated on the banks of the Nile, 
fertilise the distant shores of the Ganges. 
East is East and West is West—God forbid 
that it should be otherwise—but the twain must 
meet in amity, peace, and mutual understand- 
ing. Their meeting will be all the more fruitful 
because of their differences. Humanity will 
be perfect only when diverse races and nations 
shall be free to evolve their distinct character- 
istics, while all are attached to the stem of 
humanity by the bond of love. I do not think 


A Tea with Tagore 161 


in terms of nationality, but in terms of 
humanity.” 

“Not even in terms of Indian nationalism?” 
I ventured to ask, interrupting. “You do not 
support the nationalist movement of India, 
rumors of which we hear from time to time?” 

“Yes, even Indian nationalism; J am beyond 
all that. We need a new vocabulary as well as 
a new mind in the world. I am as much at 
home in America—if you will allow me to be— 
as laminIndia. Besides, India is not a nation; 
it is many nations, many races. It has an ap- 
pearance of unity only because it must seem to 
stand together against the dominance of big 
empires. All imperialism—except the imperial- 
ism of love—is wrong. It brings little nations 
and various races together, like chips in a 
basket, but they do not unite; they are simply 
held together. There is no bond of union.” 

“Will not the League of Nations tend to 
bring men and nations together in a different 
spirit and upon a better basis?” I inquired, little 
dreaming what the answer would be. 

“No, no,” he cried, with more force and fire 
than at any moment before. “It is a League of 
Robbers. It is a failure because it is founded 


162 Preaching in New York 


on force. It does not really care for small 
nations, except aS pawns in the old game of 
dicker and grab. It has no spiritual founda- 
tion. The time is not ripe. Humanity is not 
ready for it. A new machine is of little ad- 
vantage if it be run by the old power and for 
the old ends. Organisation is not brotherhood, 
and God cares more for a brother than He does 
for an empire. The great war was one of the 
blows of God seeking to break down our mate- 
rialism, our selfishness, our narrow national- 
isms. It made a dent, but only a dent, in the 
crust. Other blows will fall betimes. Until 
we learn to live together by the real law of our 
nature—the Law of Love—a veil will hide the 
beauty and wonder of the world, leaving us to 
wander alone or struggle together in confusion 
and strife.” 

“In short,” I interjected, “what we need is 
the law of love, as Jesus taught it, and the vision 
of the Kingdom of Heaven as it shone in his 
mind.” 

“Yes, Jesus was right,’ and he spoke the 
great name with evident love and reverence; 
“and he was a man of the East. His words are 
not simply whiffs of fragrance—they are indeed 


A Tea with Tagore 163 


poetry, but poetry believed in—but also great 
laws of life and truth; as much so as the laws 
of chemistry. But you do not believe in Jesus. 
If you did, America would be happy, and joy 
and laughter would walk the common ways of 
men. But America is not happy. It seeks 
pleasure, but it does not find joy. God is 
wanting ‘ 

Of a sudden a light came into his face, as if 
he saw a vision, and he talked—more to him- 
self than to me—about the love of God. I shall 
never forget it. The rush and roar of New 
York was hushed, and the room became a 
sanctuary. In this far country his mind had 
found its native land of the spirit. I might 
have been listening on the hillsides of Galilee, 
or beside the sea, while Jesus taught. I dare 
not try to reproduce his words. They were 
simple words, but they had such radiance of 
reality as I have never seen or felt before. I 
felt the everywhereness of God and His all- 
encompassing goodness. It was like a revela- 
tion. I shall never bow in prayer again with- 
out thinking of that moment, and how real, how 
lovely, how ineffably near God was. “May he 
grant us the beneficent mind,” he said, softly, 





164 Preaching in New York 


quoting from the Upamishad, and neither of us 
spoke for a spell. 

“How can we make this vision real to men?” 
I asked, reluctantly breaking a silence that was 
sacred. “The more lovely it is the more one 
feels impelled to seek some method whereby to 
communicate it to others.” 

“Tt will triumph,” he said, “because it is true 
and beautiful. In every land where I go—espe- 
cially on this journey, which has taken me to 
France and Belgium before coming to America 
—I find numbers of men who seek the truth and 
are yearning for its realization. They are out- 
casts, for the most part, vagabonds, poets,— 
as Jesus was in His day. But they are witnesses 
of the truth, keepers of the soul of humanity. 
What we need is a League of Vagabonds, so 
to name it, some kind of fellowship between 
these men of God whom one finds in the most 
unexpected places. Yet everywhere they recog- 
nise one another, as if they had some password 
between them. ‘They have the secret for the 
healing of the world. They know God who 
is known not by words, but by love, by joy.” 

Continuing, he said that such a conception 
might seem, at first, visionary in our practical 


A Tea with Tagore 165 


America; the mere fancy of a poet. But it is 
not. Once, by the mercy of God, a truth is 
born into the world, it can never be expelled, 
Nor can it be defeated. All who see it are 
thereafter conscripts in its service. We must 
have faith in truths, in ideas, in the finer forces 
that work quietly, as seeds grow, and never tire, 
never sleep. At the same time, we must use 
all means within our power to realize our ideals 
in practical life. 

“That is one thing that brings me to America, 
to know your people, to see your vast, uprising 
young nation, and to divine, if it may be, what 
its spirit is. Hereafter my life and all that I 
have—which is only a little—is to be devoted 
to establishing first in India, and then else- 
where, if possible, a university in which the 
better minds of all races, to whom we must look 
for leadership, may mingle, and the culture of 
the East and the culture of the West may be 
united in fellowship. It is men of world-mind 
that we need, men of the spirit, who see that 
we are all citizens in the Kingdom of Ideas. In 
this way, long after I am gone, when in the 
purpose of God the time does come for a real 
League of Humanity, there will be men large 


166 Preaching in New York 


enough to see the human scene as a whole, who 
understand that the good of humanity as a 
family actually exists, and we shall not suffer 
such a bankruptcy of constructive faith and 
vision as we have in our day.” 

Such, imperfectly reported, and lacking the 
art to reproduce the atmosphere of a noble and 
stimulating personality, was my talk over the 
tea-cups with Tagore. My feeling, as we 
parted, was that I had met one of. the most 
remarkable men, and surely the greatest lover 
of God, it has ever been my joy to know. If 
the things of which he talked, as I report them, 
seem vague, it is to be remembered that they 
are no more to be uttered than the ecstasy of 
spring mornings or the light that lies on purple 
hills. But it is to that open window of spiritual 
vision that we must look for real guidance, and 
it is the poet-prophet who must lead in the 
way and will of God. 


The New Curiosity Shop 


“New York is the greatest religious Curiosity 
Shop on the earth,” said the Poet, at the meet- 
ing of the Rainbow Club in the home of the 
beloved Physician. “If you doubt it, just read 
for once the Church page in the Saturday morn- 
ing paper, and you will see what a theological 
menagerie we have in this town. Besides all 
the regular varieties of religion, Catholic, 
Protestant, Hebrew—Trinitarian, Unitarian, 
Communitarian—we have the most variegated 
assortment of Cults anywhere to be found. 
Listen and learn: Christian Science, Mental 
Science, New Thought af 

“Near Thought, is what you ought to call 
it,’ said the Physician, with fine scorn. 
“Science, indeed! It is bootleg religion parad- 
ing as science. Fads, freaks, fakes, the lot of 
them, supported by women of a certain age 
suffering from suppressed religion. They are 
no more akin to Science than a kangaroo is like 


an archangel. It makes me tired. These long- 
167 





168 Preaching in New York 


haired men and short-haired women run hither 
and yon, knocking at the doors of dead pagan- 
isms and modern theosophies, hunting for new 
gospels which shall unlock the mysteries of life 
and destiny. Their religion is reduced to a 
pleasure excursion or an infatuated search in 
the dark continents of the occult. When they 
do not get lost in the jungles, they come back 
with nothing better than some grotesque fetish 
of low-type religion, or some fantastic dogma 
which runs counter to all the verified facts of 
science. Some people will swallow any dogma 
if only it is unreasonable. It is the Will to 
Believe gone to seed. It is a He 

“Wait! Hold your horses,” cried the Poet; 
“let me finish the list. At the League of the 
New Life you may learn “The Use of Color 
Vibration in Healing,’ and surely that ought to 
appeal to a man of your profession. In the 
McAlpin Hotel there is to be a lecture by the 
President of the College of Divine Metaphysics, 
after which ‘Audible treatment will be given.’ 
Here is another man who speaks of himself, 
with commendable modesty, as ‘the most in- 
teresting personality in the twentieth century’ 
—why miss an opportunity like that?—and his 





The New Curiosity Shop 169 


lecture is followed by ‘Classes in Concentration 
and Prosperity.’ If that is not attractive 
enough, try “The Money Man, Free Lectures 
on Success,’ and stay for the ‘Success Demon- 
stration’ at the after-meeting. Or if you like 
deep stuff make note of the following: 


“ “Bahai Brotherhood, Universal Religion, Universal 
Peace, Universal Language. Every Sunday morning 
at the Genealogical Hall.’ 

““Vedanta Society, founded by Swami Viveka- 
nanda, lecture by his Disciple, Swami Bodhanada, on 
Inward Man and Inward Life.’ 

“*‘Rosicrucian Mystic Lectures on The Three Magic 
Words, or The Harmonious Consciousness, at Amorc 
Matlin 


“Have a heart! That is enough and to 
spare!” said the Physician, with a vast disgust. 
“The Church page in the papers makes me want 
to go in the other direction—as far as my 
money will take me. What are we coming to, 
anyway? For the honour of God, for the sake 
of the soul, let us hunt for truth in every age 
and on every shore. Let us read our Bible by 
the light of every torch; but this vagrant, hotel 
religion which is nothing but an intellectual 
picnic, which is perpetually asking questions 
of every ship that comes into port; this religion 
which, the last of the month, pulls out its 


170 Preaching in New York 


memorandum-book to write down a new creed, 
‘ever learning, and never coming to the knowl- 
edge of the truth’—it is a sham and a shame! 
What is the matter with the church? Has it 
gone to pot?” 

“Seems to me,” said the Preacher, at whom 
this last shot was aimed, “that something has 
gone wrong with the medical profession, too. 
Else why do so many people go to these new 
cults to get their corns cured? ‘Audible treat- 
ment given,’ I like that touch of unconscious 
satire. The world is sick just now, and its ill- 
ness is far more mental than physical. It suf- 
fered shell-shock in the war, and hysteria 
supervened. It is easy to denounce, but it is 
better to understand. Suppose we investigate; 
suppose we attend some of these meetings and 
see what they are like—seriously, I mean, in 
the effort to discover what may be the meaning 
of it all—and report at a later meeting of the 
Club.” 

“Agreed; now you are talking sense,” said 
the Physician, who pricked up his ears at the 
word investigate. “Since the honors are about 
even as between the pulpit and the laboratory, 
by all means let us find out the facts—though 


The New Curiosity Shop 171 


I dare say it will be like looking for needles in 
a hay-stack. Still, I am willing to investigate 
anything, and a theological Zoo is as good a 
place as any to make research. Some of the 
theology the good Preacher dopes out to us 
would hardly bear investigation, methinks— 
but, as Kipling would say, that is another 
story.” 

The reports at the next meeting of the Club 
were worth going miles to hear, especially the 
experiences of the Physician, whose stories 
never lose anything in the telling. With a 
solemn, affidavit face he told how he took his 
daughter with him to the Ansonia Hotel, where 
they heard a thin, cadaverous looking person 
deliver a sermon on “The Religion of the Solar 
Plexus.” Hitherto he had thought that religion 
had its home in the human soul, but he had. 
learned a new theology which would make him 
nervous about going to prize-fights. Another 
lecture on the Science of Succe$s, followed by a 
Healing Meeting, had interested him greatly— 
the more because some of his patients were in 
the audience. The Science, as set forth, con- 
sisted, he said, of a certain formula which, if 
repeated often enough—like an incantation— 


172 Preaching in New York 


would do the trick; like a hair-tonic growing 
a wig on a billiard ball. He said it was too 
much like the process of shaving a pig. There 
is a lot of noise, but no wool. However, it was 
plain that he was interested, and it turned out 
before the evening ended that he had been doing 
some thinking betimes. 

As for the Preacher, he had been sorely de- 
pressed by his explorations, and not a little 
puzzled. He found mysticism and occultism all 
mixed up, whereas the two things are world- 
far apart. Mysticism seeks to give; occultism 
tries to get. It was all a jumble, made up of 
the heel-taps of philosophy and the fag-ends of 
superstition—quaint survivals of antique ideas, 
long since cast aside, announced as new dis- 
coveries in high-sounding words borrowed 
from psychology. Indeed, he had heard so 
many unheard of gospels taught by Parlor 
Magi, that he was dizzy—swimming round 
and round in puddles of words. Besides, he 
had found some of his former parishioners at 
every meeting he attended, and that did not add 
to his joy. The Poet had been more fortunate. 
He enjoyed the Rosicrucian lectures, and had 


The New Curiosity Shop 173 


been delving into the romantic lore of the 
Fraternity. Indeed, he had actually joined the 
Lodge, and had much to say about the beauty 
of its ritual, suggesting that the church would 
do well to have a ritual of initiation. He was 
a little surprised when the Preacher told him 
that the Church, in the early ages, had such a 
ritual, called ‘““The Discipline of the Secret,” 
after the manner of the Mystery Religions of 
the Roman Empire. The Physician opened the 
discussion: 

“Tngrowing religion—that is my diagnosis of 
the case,” he said; but it was clear that he had 
much else in his mind. “Not once did I hear the 
social note struck in any meeting that I at- 
tended. It is a Crossless Christianity, and no 
wonder it is popular. These people set little 
store, apparently, by charity, pity, or renuncia- 
tion, and the idea of social service has never 
entered their heads. They think only of their 
own personal health, or luck, or success, or 
peace of mind, and the optimism they emphasise 
—easy, evasive, dishonest—is not compatible 
with humility of heart. It is a self-centered, 
wall-eyed optimism which, when it does not 


174 Preaching in New York 


blink the hard facts of life, makes men think 
too much about themselves—as an actor keeps 
his mind fixed on his face. It is a subtle selfish- 
ness trying to wear the robes of mystical faith. 
Our age of hurry and unrest, when people take 
up with anything and make a religion of it, 
gives it vogue. It is the Religion of Jolly. 
Emerson was its Messiah and Stevenson its 
Prophet.” 

“There you are wrong, utterly wrong,” 
said the Poet, defending his fellow-singers. 
“Stevenson was no teacher of a cheap, imperti- 
nent optimism which consists in not looking at 
the facts of life, but nursing a pleasant mood 
without regard to them. Far from it. He 
prayed to be delivered from cheap pleasures, 
and refused to cheat himself into any blind- 
folded light-heartedness. He saw all the bitter, 
old, and haggard facts, but he found some good 
things too, and concentrated on the good—a 
very different thing from the ostrich attitude 
of refusing to admit the evil. When he saw 
no good at all, by sheer grit of faith he believed 


that 
“*This world’s no blot for us, 
Nor blank; it means intensely and means good.’ ” 


The New Curiosity Shop 175 


As for Emerson, it is not fair to blame him be- 
cause others have taken his heavenly wine and 
diluted it into a narcotic.” 

“Perhaps I am unjust to the poets,” said the 
Physician. “If so, I take it all back, and wish 
I had said more to take back. The fact seems 
to be that people want religion, but do not know 
how to get it. They have acquired a certain 
knowledge of physiology and mental science, 
and have become keenly interested in them- 
selves. They have discovered that soul and 
body are inseparably bound together on earth, 
and must learn to work together in harmony. 
They have learned that the mind has great 
power over the body for health, for the upbuild- 
ing of character, and for the mastery of their 
moods. They have found that they can change 
the climate of their lives by thinking—can save 
themselves from many maladies, and attain a 
brighter, stronger existence. They are receiv- 
ing their first training in mental hygiene and 
moral sanitation.” 

“So far, good,” the Preacher interrupted. 
“No doubt Noah must have known that much 
when he landed from the Ark. Hope and joy 
are curative powers; despair and sorrow, if pro- 


176 Preaching in New York 


longed, not only lower the vitality but actually 
poison the body. Worry kills, and happiness 
gives life. It is nothing new. By laying 
emphasis on a subordinate aspect of Christian- 
ity they form a new religion. New churches 
are founded and flourish, which doubtless have 
the worship of God as their purpose, but their 
chief purpose, apparently, is the healing of the 
body and mind. They teach people to use God, 
rather than to be used by Him—the old self- 
obsessed piety in another form. Jesus taught 
us to forget ourselves in the service of others.” 

“Even so,” replied the Physician; “ ‘nor soul 
helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul,’ as 
Browning put it. What if they do use God? 
He is willing to be used. Jacob began his 
prayer at Bethel with a bargain, and God kept 
His part of it. The plain fact is that we are 
living far below the limits of our possible selves, 
floundering in the misery of weakness when 
there are open to us sources of power which will 
free us for a life of energy and usefulness. 
The limits of possibility in our daily lives are 
defined less by the body than by the mind, and 
the secret of power is more spiritual than 
physical. These cults are seeking a new tech- 


The New Curiosity Shop 177 


nique of religion, a method of laying hold of 
a Power always at hand—trying to help dis- 
tracted folk to personal efficiency through 
spiritual experience—and their aim is right, 
whatever we may think of their teachings.” 
“Right you are,” said the Poet, with more 
enthusiasm than at any time in the discussion. 
“The people who haunt our hotels on Sunday 
mornings are seeking power—power to master 
the ills that beset and the dark fears that be- 
cloud their lives; and if religion cannot help 
them it is no good. In the Mark Twain story 
of the Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, as 
you remember, the Yankee saw a saint swaying 
to and fro in his ecstasy. It seemed to him a 
waste of power. So, finally, he rigged up a 
device whereby to harness the saint and use his 
motions to run a sewing machine. In other 
words, if our religion has not enough power 
in it to run a sewing machine, it is not worth 
much. It ought to ventilate our minds, keep 
us in health of spirit, and help us to do the day’s 
work with joy. For my part I think Susan 
Yellum was not far wrong when she said: 
‘Faith in A’mighty God have more to do wi’ 
the stomach than most folks think on.’ It seems 


178 Preaching in New York 


to me that Christian Science has hold of a big 
idea, and I prefer the new denial of the bad to 
the old denial of the good.” 

“Christian Science, of course, is three 
things,” said the Physician, whose opinion of 
this matter was eagerly awaited. ‘First, it is 
a religion, and I respect it as I do all other 
religions. Its great achievement is that it fixes 
attention on God. It is amazing how little 
people think about God, save as a dim idea or 
a vague First Cause. We live many a day with- 
out thinking of Him at all, wondering betimes 
why He seems unreal. When Falstaff was ill 
and cried out ‘God, God,’ his friends were 
alarmed! They did not think the time had come 
to think about God. Christian Science fixes the 
mind on God, not as far off and long ago, but as 
a reality here and now. Second, it 1s a system 
of metaphysics, and as such it must run the 
gauntlet of criticism, along with other systems; 
and I am bound to say it does not stand the 
test. Third, it is a method of healing, and here 
again it must be judged by its results—by its 
failures no less than by its victories—regarding 
which I could give testimony. It draws people 
away from the churches because it does actually 


The New Curiosity Shop 179 


help them to lay hold of God, live in Him, and 
find refuge, peace, and strength.” 

“The truth is,” he went on, disregarding the 
signal of the Preacher, “that medical science 
fails because it is not spiritual enough; and the 
church fails because it is not scientific enough. 
We Protestants need, in a different form and 
adapted to modern uses, what the Catholics call 
the Office of Direction—that is, specific and 
detailed guidance in the spiritual life, which 
those persons who have the gift of healing— 
and there are such—are peculiarly fitted to 
give. The physician must not simply tell his 
patient to be well, he must tell him how to do 
it. He must tell him how to live—in detail, I 
mean—what to eat, how to exercise, how to 
sleep, and all the rest. The church ought to do 
the same for the moral and spiritual life. 
To-day it tells men to pray, but it does not tell 
them how to pray. Prayer is a high, austere 
art, if we are to believe the masters of the 
spiritual life. It took St. Theresa years to 
master it. There are difficulties, of course, in 
handling mental and spiritual hygiene in the 
pulpit. But people need help—specific instruc- 
tion—and in their need they are going else- 


180 Preaching in New York 


where. Urged by a great desire to understand 
the workings of their own souls—whereof 
psycho-analysis has made them curious—and 
how they can overcome disease and temptation 
and worry, they go where they think they can 
find help. No doubt much of the teaching they 
hear is inadequate, but it is better than none. 
The mercenary quacks, the half-baked charla- 
tans flourish and grow rich because they have 
so many victims of sheer nerve, especially in 
our cities where we ride on a merry-go-round, 
and life is scattered and peeled. 

“Speaking of prayer,” said the Poet, “I got 
the shock of my life to-day. William James did 
it with his theory of the emotions. Hitherto, he 
said, we have held to this order: We meet a 
bear, are frightened, and run. We lose our 
fortune, are sorry, and weep. But the truth, 
he holds, is just the reverse. We see a bear, 
then follows the physical excitement, and that 
in turn is followed by the emotion of fear. If 
that is so, then by forcing the body into certain 
expressions, we evoke corresponding emotions. 
By resolute smiling, for example, we may be- 
come glad. I do not defend the theory; but I 
do know that there is not much real prayer 


The New Curiosity Shop 181 


unless a man has the will to kneel—actually 
kneel—before God. It is not enough to sit 
bolt upright and listen to a prayer, as most of 
our people do in the churches. We go to church 
to have our praying, like our singing, done for 
us. It will not do.” 

“Too many people,” said the Preacher, “if I 
may be allowed to get in a word edgewise, seem 
to think that in religion it is only enthusiasm, 
impulse, emotion that count. Religious observ- 
ance becomes the sport of caprice. They at- 
tend church, or they pray, if they feel like itt, 
whereas if we do not feel like going to church 
that is the time we ought to go. Feeling is 
made the weather-cock of the religious life. It 
is not so in other things. In business, even in 
sport, we have system, method, discipline, but 
in religion we live at haphazard. This lack of 
method in the culture of the spiritual life 
accounts for much of the unrest, not to speak 
of the uncertainty, in such matters. It is a 
wonder that we have any faith at all, so little 
care do we take to cultivate it. People want 
the joy and power of religion without paying 
the price for it. They will not submit to dis- 
cipline. Asceticism is simply a disciplined 


182 Preaching in New York 


effort to gain and end, nothing more. An 
athlete goes into training and by renunciation, 
_ by obeying rigid rules, makes his muscles firm 
and his nerves taught. When men are willing 
to do as much in order to keep spiritually fit, 
they will have their reward.” 

“At every meeting I attended,” he proceeded, 
“T found books appointed to be read, so much 
time to be spent every day in reading. That is 
a start in the right direction—but such books! 
Bereft of beauty, devoid of insight, with never 
a glint of genius! Suppose one should study 
art in that manner, leaving out of account the 
masters and taking up with some poor dauber. 
Yet that would not be more pathetic than what 
these restless, troubled souls are doing to-day. 
If there is such merit in method, as there surely 
is, why not employ it in studying the masters 
of the spiritual life? Better still, why not de- 
vote the hours spent on some poor scribbler to 
the Bible, which shows us, as in a mirror, what 
we are and what we ought to be? Why not 
give our own religion a trial before running 
after the latest toy balloon?” 

“But, my dear Preacher,” said the Physician, 
“the Bible is a hard book to read, and few know 


The New Curiosity Shop 183 


how to read it at all. It requires years of study 
to know how to read it, much less how to in- 
terpret it aright. If people would begin with 
the Life and Laws of Jesus, they might get 
somewhere. My method is to take a scene, a 
passage, from His life every day, and ponder 
it intently, reproducing all its vivid human 
color in my imagination, until I can hear the 
voice of the Master, and see His gesture when 
He puts forth his hand to heal. At first it was 
hard work, but it has become a habit. In this 
way I get back into the atmosphere of Jesus, 
into the spirit of his mind, and, somehow, he 
does not seem far away. For, in these matters 
distance does not count and time does not sig- 
nify. Say what you will, in fellowship with 
Jesus a man begins to become master of him- 
self through some moral energy that is asso- 
ciated with Him. It reaches to the core of 
our being, to the divided self that has been 
struggling for expression and control.” * 

“Tn short,” he added, “we need to realise that 
the inner life is also a realm of law, and when 
we obey the laws of Jesus he can do for us 
to-day what He did for men in days of old. 

1 Man and the Attainment of Immortality, by J. Y. Simpson. 


184 Preaching in New York 


The power that was in Him is with us still— 
abundantly with us, if we have the will to lay 
hold of it and use it. But we must not use 
it merely for selfish ends, else it will be denied 
us. Jesus was never ill, because He knew how 
to live. His gospel is not a stick of candy, but 
a way of life—happy, wholesome, healthy—a 
full-orbed human life, radiant and radiating. 
Some day, taught by Him—science learning 
equally with theology—we shall learn how to 
master ourselves, how to make a new world by 
tapping sources of power always at our dis- 
posal, and change a wicked industrial order into 
a system of fraternal service. Perhaps we may 
even save the church, and make it the centre 
of all the redemptive forces of society.” 

“Quite a speech,” cried the Poet; “and when 
the Physician preaches better than the Preacher, 
it is time to go. However, I must have my say. 
I rise to tell you that the Battle of Armaged- 
don is now being fought, and America is the 
battlefield. It is the old battle—old as the 
world—between mechanism and mysticism, be- 
tween materialism and spirituality. If America 
goes religious, the world will be saved. If we 
are inundated by a tide of materialism, if we 


The New Curiosity Shop 185 


give way either to the Moloch of Money or to 
the Cult of Comfort—we are lost. It will be a 
fight to a finish, and every man who loves the 
things of the spirit must fit himself, train him- 
self, and be a soldier in the Wars of God!” 


New York City’ 


I 


The history of humanity, as told in the Bible, 
begins in a Garden of God and ends in a City of 
God. It moves between two mighty seers— 
Moses, whose vision brooded over the dark 
chaos of old, singing the song of creation and 
the epic of human beginnings; and the Prisoner 
of Patmos, whose insight forecast in solemn 
apocalypse the final issues of man and the 
world. In that picturesque setting we are 
shown the meaning of the human drama, its 
struggle, its tragedy, its slow triumph, in the 
light of eternity. For, manifestly, men are here 
upon the earth not simply to wander under 
green trees, but to learn to live together right- 
eously, kindly, humanly, after the Divine 
ordinance of society. 

Such is the theology of history as the Bible 

*Sermon preached in the Church of the Divine Paternity, 


Dec, toth, 1922, “Ye Olde Settler’s Association of the West 
Side” joining in the service and celebration. 


186 


New York City 187 


interprets it, reading the meaning of the human 
drama in the presence of God. What a ro- 
mance it recites! It begins at the beginning, 
with the wandering shepherds and wayfarers 
in the dim morning of time. We see the rise 
and the home and the family, of the tribe and 
the nation; a race passing through slavery to 
civilised life; the gradual building of a rich 
and complex social order; its prosperity, its 
splendor, its testing time, its final fall—and its 
dream of a City that hath foundations, where 
there is no sadness nor weeping, neither pain 
nor death, and Society has become a Temple. 
The story of mankind is thus a story of its 
great cities, and a prophecy of the one City. 
Hitherto four cities have stood out in the annals 
of man as centres of the highest life of the 
race, and about them are gathered the vastest 
accumulations of history and of legend: Jeru- 
salem, Athens, Rome, and London. 

No city has, no city may ever hope to have, 
the same place in the spiritual geography of 
mankind as Jerusalem. If Rome is the Eternal 
City, Jerusalem is the City of the Eternal. For 
four thousand years that old grey city has been 
an altar and a confessional of humanity. There 


188 Preaching in New York 


our poor, tempted, troubled race has meditated, 
repented, and aspired, lifting up hands of sup- 
plication. There the spiritual in man has found 
voice, as nowhere else, in the melody of song, 
the importunity of prayer, and the solemnity 
of prophecy. There the Unutterable has spoken 
in words the simplest, the most profound, the 
most artless, in which the deep eternal wish of 
the soul that drifts Godward has received an- 
swer in the Psalms of David, the visions of 
Isaiah, and the words of Jesus. There was re- 
vealed the unity of God, His spirituality, His 
holiness, and His loving-kindness which is 
better than life. There, through long centuries, 
man has poured out his agony and ecstasy of 
soul, and felt the response of a Pity, a Power, 
a Purity which endureth forever. Often cap- 
tured, often destroyed, that old city still stands, 
time-stained and immovable, as indestructible 
as the Faith of which it is the symbol. Re- 
ligiously it is the capital of the world, if only 
because Jesus walked in it and wept over it. 
It is not far from Jerusalem to Athens—only 
a short sail over soft seas—yet what a differ- 
ence in atmosphere and association! Athens 
shines like a white star in the great world’s 


New York City 189 


crown of intellectual glory. Its very name is 
an inspiration. It is the City of the Intellect, 
the city of philosophy, of art, of the worship 
of the god of bounds and the vision of the holi- 
ness of beauty. No constellation of great minds 
has ever surpassed that which shone in Athens 
in its Golden Age. Though ages have passed, 
and “the glory that was Greece’ has faded, 
those voices still speak to us concerning the 
things of the mind. Socrates is still a great 
master of man, alike by his wisdom in life and 
his nobility in death. Plato still discourses of 
his Divine philosophy, and the stately tragedies 
of Atschylus and Sophocles unrolled the awful 
secrets of life and destiny. To-day, if a bit of 
Grecian marble is dug up from some old ruin, 
it makes a new date in the story of art. No- 
where else has the human mind attained to such 
splendor, and ancient Athens still stands, 
despite the mutations of time, a bright City of 
the Mind built against outward distraction for 
inward consolation and shelter. 

Rome ruled the world from her seven hills of 
power, but the grandeur of that imperial city 
has vanished. Once her great stone roads drew 
the earth into a unity of empire—first by the 


190 ~=6Preaching in New York 


military genius of Julius Cesar, and then by the 
statesmanship of Augustus—and her legions 
tramped the world. To-day the Forum, where 
the twelve tables were promulgated, where the 
Preetorian edicts were announced, and where 
Antonius and Cicero argued on points of law 
and ethics, is an expanse of utter wreck, where 
antiquarians search for the vestiges of great 
events and the foot-prints of great men. The 
triumphal arch of Titus—who captured Jeru- 
salem—still stands, but under it no triumphs 
sweep on to the capitol. The Roman Empire 
is dead and we may stand by its grave; but its 
executive genius, its jurisprudence did not die. 
It went forth to be a blessing to the whole 
human race and the basis of universal law. 
This is the real empire; this, like the empire of 
science, knows no bounds. It is not propagated 
by violence. It knows no decay. It still lives, 
long after the vast aggregations of territory 
piled together by human ambition have dis- 
solved and disappeared. 

London, with its mist, its fog, its rain, its 
monotonous and melancholy houses, built ap- 
parently without plan or design, the far past 
blending with the near future in its mingled 


New York City 191 


misery and magnificence, is the home of a wise 
and ordered Liberty and the mother-city of a 
mighty race. From the first song of Cedmon, 
the serving man, to Alfred the Great, on down 
the long, tragic, heroic history, it has been a 
sanctuary of civilisation, in whose genius two 
essential but seemingly opposing factors have 
been united—individual freedom and subjection 
to law. No wonder we love it, knowing not 
which London we love best, the London of 
fiction or the London of history, or that blend- 
ing of both, the London of Literature. If ever 
London Bridge does fall down, as Macaulay 
predicted it would, and a man from the ends of 
the earth sits on a broken pier and muses on the 
ruins of St. Paul’s Cathedral, he will testify 
that on the banks of the Thames there once 
stood a great citadel of liberty and a shrine of 
law. These are the great cities of the Old 
World—with Paris a centre of art and fashion, 
a Woman with a rose in her hair—vast as- 
semblies of humanity, each memorable in his- 
tory, and emblems, respectively, of Faith, 
Philosophy, Law, and Liberty. 


192 + Preaching in New York 


il 


New York is the city of the future—an old 
city in the New World, a new city by Old World 
reckoning—already a peer of any city on earth, 
and destined to be the greatest city the world 
has ever known. In 1820 it had one hundred 
and thirty thousand inhabitants; in 1920 six 
millions; and a century hence, by its present 
rate of growth, it will be a metropolis of more 
than twenty millions—a human encampment so 
bewilderingly vast as to stagger the imagina- 
tion. Even within a single generation, by 
virtue of its location, its genius, its enterprise, 
it has almost grown beyond the knowledge of 
its own people. Never since time began has 
there been such a flowing together of races, 
such a blending of bloods; and by that token, as 
Jerusalem is a symbol of Faith, Athens of 
Philosophy, Rome of Law, London of Liberty, 
so New York, by the spirit and prophecy of its 
history, must be a City of Fraternity. A place 
where world-end peoples meet—drawn_ to- 
gether, jammed together—it is a Tower of 
Babel alike in its architecture and in its medley 
of tongues, and it will end in confusion and 


New York City 193 


disaster unless there is a Pentecost of Brother- 
hood. Heh 

No city in the New World has a history more 
romantic, more fascinating than New York, 
and no city is more indifferent to its own his- 
tory. As some one has said, it is as if the city 
had somehow been aware, from the first, of its 
national and cosmic role, and has sacrificed as 
provincialism and local color what other cities 
would have cherished as a treasure. Boston, 
by dint of emphasis, has made the history of 
America read like the story of New England; 
1620 an epoch-making date, and Plymouth 
Rock the Gibraltar of the New World. Indeed, 
it has well nigh made Puritanism a national 
cult, its narrowness a nobility, its harsh intol- 
erance the hardiness of the pioneer, its May- 
flower the shining symbol of adventure. Penn 
still presides over Philadelphia, and Inde- 
pendence Hall adds its heroic background to a 
cozy conservatism. By contrast, in his apology 
for the Knickerbocker History of New York, 
Washington Irving was surprised to find how 
few of his fellow-citizens were aware that their 
city had ever been called New Amsterdam, “or 
cared a straw about their ancient Dutch 


194 Preaching in New York 


progenitors.”” Fewer still, perhaps, know that 
their city was once named New Orange. No, 
in New York the local is lost or forgotten; the 
great fact is not its history, but the wonder of 
the city itself, rising like magic, drawing the 
ends of the earth together, as cosmopolitan in 
its origin as in its genius, an epitome of hu- 
manity, a prophecy of the unity of mankind— 
a human ocean where no man is more than a 
tiny wave, and no event more than a passing 
ripple. 

None the less, a glimpse into the past is 
needed, if we are to realise what a human 
miracle has come to pass on Manhattan Island 
since the sturdy Dutch traders found it in 
1613—buying it from the Red Men for twenty- 
four dollars, and paying for it with beads and 
rum. My friend Rufus Wilson, in his New 
York, Old and New, gives us a picture of the 
Island in its native beauty: “its lower end made 
up of wooded hills and grassy valleys, rich in 
wild fruits and flowers, and its middle portion 
covered in part by a chain of swamps and 
marshes and a deep pond, with a tiny island in 
the middle, while to the northward it rose into 
high rocky ground, covered with dense forest, 


New York City 195 


which was filled with abundance of game. 
Small ponds dotted the island in various places, 
and these with a score of brooks and rivulets 
swarmed with fish.” It is a far cry from the 
maze of criss-cross avenues and the wilderness 
of sky-scrapers to-day back to that sylvan scene, 
where the thrifty Dutch traded with the Indians 
before the Pilgrim Fathers landed, built their 
rude huts of bark, and soon were cultivating 
their bouweries, or farms, the while they wel- 
comed wanderers of many races and many 
faiths. A hardy, God-fearing, liberty-loving 
folk, they transplanted to the shores of the New 
World the wise tolerance of their motherland 
—a legacy more precious than all the gold in all 
the hills. 

Boston Common has a place of honor in the 
story of the Revolution, and no one can dim its 
lustre; but who celebrates the thrilling scenes 
around what is now City Hall Park in New 
York? There, six weeks before the Boston 
Massacre, the Sons of Liberty fought the 
King’s soldiers, and an unknown sailor boy re- 
ceived a mortal thrust from a British bayonet 
—the first to give his life for the Republic! A 
monument to Attucks and his fellows stands on 


196 ~=Preaching in New York 


the Common, while only an obscure tablet in 
the dingy post-office building marks the Battle 
of Golden Hill. Manhattan Island and its 
environs saw many a hard-fought battle, when 
the cause of freedom hung in the balance. For 
six years New York was the capital city of 
the nation. Here Washington took the oath of 
office as President; here he struggled with diffi- 
culties almost beyond mortal power; here he 
worshipped in old St. Paul’s church. Here 
Jefferson and Adams took counsel, here Ham- 
ilton sleeps. Faneuil Hall remains in Boston, 
but the old Federal Hall in New York, in which 
the first Congress assembled, has vanished. 
Cherry Street, where Washington and Hamil- 
ton lived, is now a dismal slum, where squalor 
has erased well nigh every trace of a mighty 
past. Fraunce’s Tavern and St. Paul’s Church 
with its village graveyard—its dark, slender, 
graceful spire looking like a toy alongside the 
towering monoliths on every side—are almost 
the only links with the old New York where 
Washington walked, planned, and toiled. Only 
faint touches linger here and yonder to tell us 
of our history, the Mansion in State Street, 
parts of the Church of St. Mark’s-in-the- 


New York City 197 


Bouwerie, to which we must add a bit of the 
old Jewish burying-ground in the new Bowery, 
set apart to its holy uses in 1656. 

Yet, strangely enough, no one foresaw what 
New York was destined to be, though its 
strategic location, its incomparable Harbor, 
and its rapid growth, might have given at least 
a hint. Even in 1803, when the City Hall was 
built, it was faced on three sides with marble, 
and on the north side with red sandstone, be- 
cause, it was believed, “few citizens would ever 
reside on that side.” Not many can even name 
the villages and hamlets nestled amid the woods 
and lakes of the upper reaches of old Manhat- 
tan, now obliterated by the advance of the city 
—save here a jog in a street and there a wind- 
ing, eccentric alley. Greenwich Village quaintly 
survives as the Quartier Latin of New York, 
and the names of Murray Hill and Harlem 
remain, but who can locate Yorkville, Chelsea, 
Richmond Hill, Bloomingdale, Carmansville, 
Odellville, Bull’s Head, and Mount Pleasant? 
In Boston the Back Bay and Charlestown still 
have colorful identity, and in London Chelsea 
and Clapham have individuality and charm; but 
the lovely hamlets of Manhattan are hardly 


198 Preaching in New York 


even figures in “the linoleum carpet of New 
York.” The Dyckman House and the Van 
Cortland and Jumel Mansions are happily pre- 
served in upper New York; North Washington 
Square is still partly intact—like Union and 
Madison Squares, a Potter’s Field reclaimed— 
and Stuyvesant Place and Front Street keep 
memories of the charm of the olden time. With 
ruthless might the uprising city has moved on, 
leaving its past and forgetting local pride in 
its vision of a stupendous future. 


Itt 


What, then, is the New York of to-day and 
to-morrow? It is the world in miniature, at 
once a metropolis and a maelstrom, a frontier 
where the Old and the New Worlds meet; a 
vast human laboratory in which all kinds and 
conditions of men,—all races, creeds and 
colors,—are being wrought, by the chemistry 
of contact and good will, into a new Fraternity. 
As there are many Londons—the London of 
the Tower and the Abbey, of Downing Street 
and Piccadilly, of Bethnal Green and the Strand 
—so there is the New York of Fifth Avenue 
and Orchard Street, of Broadway and the 


New York City 199 


Bowery, of Park Avenue and Greenwich Vil- 
lage, of Wall Street and San Juan Hill, of 
Chinatown, Central Park, and Riverside Drive; 
of Edith Wharton and O. Henry. Fabulous 
in its wealth, abysmal in its poverty, glaring in 
its contrasts yet gracious in its spirit; it has a 
new Jerusalem on the Lower and Upper East 
Side and in the Bronx; a new Rome south of 
Washington Square; a new Athens on Pearl 
Street; a new Africa in Harlem; and a little 
Syria on Hudson Street. What a social marvel, 
what an incredible human compound, what a 
challenge to a creative fraternity—no wonder it 
stirred the soul of a mystic like Whitman, in 
whose ample vision its moving multitudes found 
sympathy and song. Pray God it may be a 
New York of many races without rancor, and 
many faiths without fanaticism! 

Three things are taught by New York, as 
mutch by its history as by its genius and growth; 
and the first is that in such a concourse of 
peoples racial rancor must give way to mutual 
respect and mutual service, if we are not to live 
on a human volcano. Those who deride New 
York as a “polyglot boarding-house,” as if its 
mingling of many races were a_ recent 


200 #£2Preaching in New York 


“scourge,” do not know its ancient lineage, 
much less its spirit. As early as 1650, eighteen 
languages were spoken on Manhattan Island. 
From the first New York has been a city of 
the large and liberal air, drawing its citizens 
from many lands, not only Dutch, English, and 
Irish, but Germans, Swedes, French, Jews, and, 
in later years, dwellers of the uttermost parts 
of the earth and the isles of the sea. For that 
reason it must know no Saxon race, no Teutonic 
race, no Slavic race, but only the Human Race, 
of which it is a centre and a symbol. Never, 
perhaps, has the world seen such an experiment 
of mankind living together ; nowhere else do so 
many people of so many races live so close to- 
gether as on this Island—neighbors by neces- 
sity, as they must learn to be in spirit and pur- 
pose. It is the Metropolis of Democracy, in 
which a boy born in a swarming ghetto may die 
in a palace on Fifth Avenue, and the son of a 
hod-carrier may become the Mayor of the City. 
Therefore, any man who sows suspicion or in- 
jects racial rancor into the life of our city be- 
trays its history and belies its spirit and 
prophecy. New York is vast, many-faceted, 
myriad-tongued, but there is no room in it for 


New York City 201 


hate, prejudice, or contempt of man for man. 

What is true of the need of racial fraternity 
in New York, is equally true of its religious 
fellowship. Happily the Dutch brought to the 
shores of the New World their wise policy of 
religious toleration, and it attracted swarms of 
exiles from many nations, tormented folk of 
many faiths, Waldenses of Piedmont, German 
Lutherans, French Huguenots, Scotch Presby- 
terians, English Independents, Moravians, 
Anabaptists, Jews, and Quakers. Except for a 
sad interlude under Peter Stuyvesant, a 
fanatical Calvinist—whose spirit ‘was as un- 
bending as his wooden leg—this spirit of “‘live 
and let live, think and let think,” has ever been 
the genius of New York. When the Puritans 
of New England, who had dared so much for 
liberty of faith, began to persecute the slightest 
dissent, their fleeing victims found refuge in 
New Amsterdam—among them Roger Wil- 
liams and Anne Hutchinson. With such a 
legacy of liberty and good will, we dare not 
allow an evil spirit of bigotry to flare up among 
us, poisoning the community. It behooves 
right-thinking men of all races and religions to 
join hands against those who would “Ulsterise”’ 


202 +#Preaching in New York 


New York, making its streets the scenes of 
tragedies such as have terrified Belfast. 
Happily, by the mercy of God, we are learn- 
ing a larger outlook and a more catholic con- 
fidence, and we know that all religions are holy 
—Christian, Hebrew, Catholic, Protestant— 
and most of all the common, eternal, religion in 
which the service of man is the truest token of 
faith in God. But toleration is not enough; we 
must have insight, sympathy, and understand- 
ing. Exclusiveness must be excluded, bitter- 
ness must be banished; for surely it is only by 
fraternal righteousness among men that we 
may hope to realise atonement with the Father 
of Men, whose love embraces all peoples and 
fulfils all faiths. In His presence, and in face 
of a need as appealing as that of New York— 
where iniquity is so appalling, and spiritual 
loneliness so pathetic—bigotry of any kind is 
blindness, and sectarianism is stupidity. If 
ever upon this earth we are to attain to the new 
synthesis of spiritual insight, enterprise, and co- 
operation, so long dreamed of, which shall make 
our present sects seem like men playing with 
the toys of religion, it must be in this amazing 
city. Perhaps, in the long last, we shall see 


New York City 203 


the fulfilment of that great Russian apocalyptic 
story, forecasting the final battle of spirituality 
against materialism, in which Jew and Gentile 
fight together, singing “the Song of Moses and 
the Lamb.?? 


IV 


For New York is an apocalypse of America, 
and a prophecy of its future—the centre of its 
finance, its fashion, and its fraternity—and if 
it is to be redeemed from materialism and futil- 
ity, it must be the focus of a creative patriotism, 
a wise moral idealism, and an authentic spiritual 
vision. Democracy is not a panacea; science 
is nota saviour. Unless the spiritual quality is 


*More accurately, it is less a story than a “conversation,” 
and may be found in a remarkable book entitled “War and 
Christianity,” by Vladimir Solovyof, with an introduction by 
Stephen Graham. (Constables Russian Library.) In a re- 
cent symposium of opinion and prophecy on the future of 
civilization, a Frenchman, a Russian, and a Spaniard all agree 
that the present chaos is due, primarily, to a lack of “world- 
feeling”—lack of religion—and that there is no way out of 
the bog without a creative spiritual renewal. It is significant 
that all three turn to Russia as the East out of which will 
dawn a new spiritual day, finding their clue in the experience 
of Christ in the Russian soul, especially in the great, tor- 
mented, Christ-seeking Dostoeivsky. What if out of the deep, 
pitiful soul of Russia—despised and rejected by the world— 
there should come an altogether other dimension of faith, 
redeeming the western world from materialism, brutality, and 
futility! Long ago another prophesied “a great White Christ 
rising out of Russia,” a vision to heal a wounded world. 
Stranger things have happened, and the ways of God are past 
finding out. 


204. Preaching in New York 


made vivid and victorious, both in private char- 
acter and in public-mindedness, the multitudes 
of our metropolis will become a mob, its wealth 
a gilded confusion, and its poverty an abyss of 
misery and despair. In New York, of all places 
on earth, men ought to think in terms of one 
humanity and one religion, and learn that the 
good of the race as a whole does actually exist; 
which is the first fact and corner-stone of any 
world unity. Only as we toil in the light of 
the Kingdom of God may we ever hope to build 
the Commonwealth of Man, making many 
races, creeds and colors into a Community of 
Humanity in which justice shall join hands with 
joy. 

Without such a vision our city will perish, as 
other cities have perished before us; because 
our human life is from above downward. Ex- 
cept the Lord build the city they labor in vain 
who build it; and He builds it in the degree in 
which His will is the law of its life. Citizen- 
ship at its best—sagacious, forward-looking, 
prophetic—is found in the ancient words: 
“And I saw the Holy City.” William Blake 
knew whereof he wrote: 


New York City 205 


I will not cease from mental fight, 

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, 
Till we have built Jerusalem 

In England’s green and pleasant land. 


If we forget Jerusalem—with its mighty faith 
in God, its passion for righteousness, its sweet- 
toned voice of prayer—Rome fails, London 
fails, and New York fails! Without the faith 
and vision which burned in the city on Mount 
Moriah, our race loses its way in the dim coun- 
try of this world, and its life becomes a brawl in 
the dark. Evermore “a dream cometh with a 
multitude of business,” and it is the dream that 
redeems the business from brutality. If we 
have a vision of the Holy City where there is no 
trafficking in human souls, we can the better 
face without dismay the unholy city where 
heart treads on heart. Fifty men may have 
fifty different methods to be followed, but if all 
see the Holy City they will find a way to work 
together toward it. 

A great living master of practical mysticism 
has used this illustration, as apt as it is pic- 
turesque. It is said that when the huge Hell 
Gate Bridge was a-building over the East River 
in New York, the engineers found the hull of 
an old ship embedded in the river just where 


206 += Preaching in New York 


one of the central piers was to go down. No 
tug boat was able to move it, much less lift it out 
of the ooze. They were perplexed, until some 
one hit upon the idea of making the sea move 
it. They chained a flat-boat to the sunken 
hull when the tide was out, and waited. Slowly 
the tide returned, pushed by the sea and pulled 
by the moon, and the old ship was lifted inch by 
inch. Then it was floated out to sea and 
dropped where it would never again be in the 
way. The pier was sunk, the bridge built, and 
over it the shuffling feet of multitudes cross the 
river. Just so, there are tides of the Spirit, 
vast laws of the moral and social life which, if 
we learn how to use them, will lift our bigotries 
and out-worn rancors, and clear the way for 
that bridge which shall join the streets of New 
York to the streets of the other City of God, 
wherein, at last, the souls of the whole world 
shall assemble. 


THE END. 


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